Yanis Varoufakis Quotes
Even though I resigned as Papandreou's adviser early in 2006 and turned into his government's staunchest critic during his mishandling of the post-2009 Greek implosion, my public interventions in the debate on Greece and Europe have carried no whiff of Marxism.
Yanis Varoufakis
Quotes to Explore
Europe in its infinite wisdom decided to deal with this bankruptcy by loading the largest loan in human history on the weakest of shoulders … What we’ve been having ever since is a kind of fiscal waterboarding that has turned this nation into a debt colony.
Yanis Varoufakis
The referendum of 5th July will stay in history as a unique moment when a small European nation rose up against debt-bondage...
Yanis Varoufakis
In occupied Iraq, the introduction of new paper money took almost a year, 20 or so Boeing 747s, the mobilisation of the U.S. military's might, three printing firms, and hundreds of trucks.
Yanis Varoufakis
(The Eurozone) resembles a fine riverboat that was launched on a still ocean in 2000. And then the first storm that hit it, in 2008, started creating serious structural problems for it. We started leaking water. And of course, the people in the third class, as in the Titanic, start feeling the drowning effects first.
Yanis Varoufakis
Bankruptocracy is as much a European predicament as it is an American 'invention.' The difference between the experience of the two continents is that at least Americans did not have to labour under the enormous design faults of the eurozone.
Yanis Varoufakis
We Greeks are the blacks of Europe.
Yanis Varoufakis
I plan to concentrate on helping set up a Pan-European political movement, inspired by the Athens Spring, that will work toward Europe's democratization.
Yanis Varoufakis
Because I spent many years during my previous life as an academic researching game theory, some commentators rushed to presume that as Greece's new finance minister, I was busily devising bluffs, stratagems and outside options, struggling to improve upon a weak hand. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Yanis Varoufakis
My hope that Thatcher would inadvertently bring about a new political revolution was well and truly bogus. All that sprang out of Thatcherism were extreme financialisation, the triumph of the shopping mall over the corner store, the fetishisation of housing and Tony Blair.
Yanis Varoufakis
Why did they force us to close the banks? To instil fear in people.And spreading fear is called terrorism.
Yanis Varoufakis
Berlin has traditionally backed a rules-based eurozone in which every member state is responsible for its own finances, including bank bailouts, with political union limited to a fiscal overlord's possessing veto power over national budgets that violate the rules.
Yanis Varoufakis
Game theorists analyze negotiations as if they were split-a-pie games involving selfish players.
Yanis Varoufakis
For some reason, lots of terrible things start here and then spread. The Cold War was one. It didn't start in Berlin - it started in Athens in December 1944; the contagion in the eurozone started here in 2010. We are perfectly capable as Europeans of messing things up unnecessarily.
Yanis Varoufakis
My first encounter with Marx's writings came very early in life, as a result of the strange times I grew up in, with Greece exiting the nightmare of the neofascist dictatorship of 1967-74.
Yanis Varoufakis
Every non-Marxist economic theory that treats human and non-human productive inputs as interchangeable assumes that the dehumanisation of human labour is complete. But if it could ever be completed, the result would be the end of capitalism as a system capable of creating and distributing value.
Yanis Varoufakis
...faced with a choice between an agreement that is to the advantage of the peoples of Europe and one that bolsters their own power within the EU institutions at the expense of Europe’s social economies, the Brussels establishment, and the powerful politicians behind them, will choose the latter every time.
Yanis Varoufakis
The euro is a hybrid of a fixed exchange-rate regime, like the 1980s ERM or the 1930s gold standard, and a state currency.
Yanis Varoufakis
Even though I resigned as Papandreou's adviser early in 2006 and turned into his government's staunchest critic during his mishandling of the post-2009 Greek implosion, my public interventions in the debate on Greece and Europe have carried no whiff of Marxism.
Yanis Varoufakis
