The European Union’s supporters celebrate the survival of the euro, the fact that public debt is no longer the threat it was, and, crucially, that their mercantilist business model remains intact. But it has come at a steep price: Europe’s permanent stagnation and continuing fragmentation. ATHENS – Europe is languishing in a long-term economic slump whose origins […]
The post Europe’s 15-Year Slump – Project Syndicate op-ed appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.
Since taking over as president of the European Central Bank in late 2019, Christine Lagarde has committed three major errors that play right into the hands of right-wing populists. Now, one can only hope that these parties’ own incompetence will sink them before next year’s European Parliament elections. ATHENS – Christine Lagarde’s three blunders as president […]
The post Christine Lagarde’s Gifts to Populists – Project Syndicate appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.
My grandmother had the theory that, as we get older, our mind subconsciously cleanses our memories of a myriad misfortunes, leaving a sanitised version of the past for us to feel nostalgic about. The optimism of remembrance, she called it. Little did she know that her reasonable hypothesis would, one day, become the climate change […]
The post What’s behind this summer’s unnaturally huge Greek forest fires – UNHERD appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.
Inglorious procrastination is one of the European Union’s standard responses to major crises. This is not merely due to the difficulty of getting twenty-seven Prime Ministers and Presidents to agree. It is also because of their motivated tendency to ask themselves the wrong questions, thus heading slowly but inexorably to self-harming policy solutions. After the […]
The post Why can’t the EU power ahead with green subsidies like Biden’s? It isn’t just political procrastination – THE GUARDIAN appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.
The United States is experiencing an investment boom, owing to industrial policies that grant enormous subsidies – including to European firms – for investing in America, largely in green tech. Europe, meanwhile, is responding with a return to the austerity policies that caused it to fall behind the US in the first place. ATHENS – […]
The post Austerity Ruined Europe, and Now It’s Back – Project Syndicate op-ed appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.
Humanity has now developed AI algorithms capable of fully decoding a killer bug’s proteins and creating an effective antibiotic. Was there ever any doubt that conglomerates like Amazon would seize upon this opportunity to shrink workplaces along their supply chain where AI predicts a higher probability of unionization? ATHENS – Last week brought a rare good-news […]
The post New AI Germ Busters Can Also Bust Unions – Project Syndicate op-ed appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.
The week started ominously with a French journalist asking me whether the Greeks have turned cold-hearted, alluding to the apparent apathy to the drowning of hundreds of refugees off the coast of the Peloponnese and to the murky role played in this tragedy by our Coastguard. Yes, I replied without a second thought. A population […]
The post How the EU out-trumped Trump, plus what is killing capitalism: My last week’s Diary in The New Statesman appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.
Once upon a time, the greed of tobacco companies was channeled through libertarian outrage over the restriction of smokers’ freedom to choose cancer. Today, the outrage is serving the interests of bankers panicking at the prospect of central bank digital currencies. ATHENS – When First Republic Bank failed, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation organized a […]
The post Who’s Afraid of Central Bank Digital Currencies? Project Syndicate op-ed appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.
Only a comprehensive reconfiguration of property rights over the increasingly cloud-based instruments of production, distribution, collaboration, and communication can rescue the foundational liberal idea of liberty as self-ownership. Reviving the liberal individual thus requires precisely what liberals detest: a revolution. ATHENS – My father was the epitome of the liberal individual, a splendid irony for […]
The post The Strange Death of the Liberal Individual – Project Syndicate op-ed appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.
The banking system we take for granted is unfixable. The good news is that we no longer need to rely on any private, rent-seeking, socially destabilizing network of banks, at least not the way we have so far. This time the banking crisis is different. It is, in fact, worse than in 2007/8 when we […]
The post Time to Blow Up the Banking System – Project Syndicate, March 2023 appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.