If the US president-elect’s efforts to eliminate America’s trade deficit succeed, real-estate prices in Miami and Manhattan will crash, the cost of servicing government debt will skyrocket and the Dow Jones will plummet. Perhaps he should be reminded that the most vengeful of deities is one that grants him his sincerest wish. ATHENS – Donald […]
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On 9 February 1967, hours after the US Air Force had levelled the Port of Haiphong and several Vietnamese airfields, NBC aired a Star Trek episode featuring a concept that clashed mercilessly with what had just happened in Vietnam: the Prime Directive – a general ban on its Starship captains from using superior technology (military […]
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How does wealth manage to persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? By merely posing his dazzling question in 1952, Aneurin Bevan captured liberal democracy’s greatest paradox. Today, in the era of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance and their Big Tech brethren, Bevan’s time-honoured paradox has only grown preposterously. […]
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Advocates of European unity used to celebrate the European Union as a peace project. But well before Russia invaded Ukraine, the European vision of a peaceful road to shared prosperity had begun to frazzle, and now the invasion has facilitated the EU’s mutation into something much uglier. ATHENS – Europe has become unrecognizable. Advocates of […]
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It is one thing to U-turn on a modest green transition programme. It is another to do so using mendacious Tory economic paradigms. Rarely has a lacklustre policy been abandoned for a reason so bad that it threatens to inflict long-term damage on a society. Independently of whether the £28bn green investment programme was the […]
The post Why is Labour still using the self-defeating, discredited ‘maxed out credit card’ analogy? The GUARDIAN appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.
Manos, a sixth-generation farmer from Thessaly, put it to me bluntly when I asked him to explain why he was prepared to drive his tractor 400km to Athens to camp outside Parliament: “If I don’t, my farm will soon follow our village school, co-op, post office and bank branch into oblivion.” His story is neither […]
The post The roots of European farmers’ anger were baked into the EU – UNHERD appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.
It was early September in 1971. My mother had taken me in a taxi to a boutique hotel in a leafy northern Athenian suburb to visit my favourite uncle, her beloved brother. Before we got out the car, she put her arm around me and whispered words of courage in my ear. You see, Hotel […]
The post NATO from the perspective of having grown up under US-sponsored neofascism – UNHERD appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.
Against the backdrop of the new cold war between the United States and China, the European Union’s top brass seems to be adding to the pressure on China by issuing credible threats in response to four grievances. Alas, the Chinese authorities are probably more amused than alarmed. ATHENS – On the December 7, the presidents […]
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Big Tech is so profoundly different from other industries that it cannot be regulated like the trusts, cartels, or conglomerates of the past. After all, if regulators tried to break up Facebook or TikTok, they would be confronted by enraged users for whom the universal nature of these platforms is the reason they use them. […]
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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 […]
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