Monday, July 13, 2015

New Statesman — Exclusive: Yanis Varoufakis opens up about his five month battle to save Greece


YV: It was a setup.

Everyone is waiting for the book.

New Statesman
Exclusive: Yanis Varoufakis opens up about his five month battle to save Greece

2 comments:

John said...

Interview with the New Statesman http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2015/07/yanis-varoufakis-full-transcript-our-battle-save-greece

Well worth reading. Some highlights, some of which are illuminating. The first and last don't make much sense given YV's determination to stay on the EZ. On a possible Grexit, YV says that he wouldn't know how to handle it. In which case, he should have paid Bill Mitchell's air fare, and not forgetting our very own Neil Wilson.

YV: "I’m also relieved I don’t have to sustain any longer this incredible pressure to negotiate for a position I find difficult to defend..."

YV: "It’s not that it didn’t go down well – it’s that there was point blank refusal to engage in economic arguments. Point blank. … You put forward an argument that you’ve really worked on – to make sure it’s logically coherent – and you’re just faced with blank stares. It is as if you haven’t spoken. What you say is independent of what they say. You might as well have sung the Swedish national anthem – you’d have got the same reply."

YV: "The answer is no [we did not try to work with the governments of other indebted countries], and the reason is very simple: from the very beginning those particular countries made it abundantly clear that they were the most energetic enemies of our government, from the very beginning. And the reason of course was their greatest nightmare was our success: were we to succeed in negotiating a better deal for Greece, that would of course obliterate them politically, they would have to answer to their own people why they didn’t negotiate like we were doing."

YV: "If we manage to get out of this mess united, and handle properly a Grexit … it would be possible to have an alternative. But I’m not sure we would manage it, because managing the collapse of a monetary union takes a great deal of expertise, and I’m not sure we have it here in Greece without the help of outsiders."

YV: "If anything it [a new bail out package] will be worse [than that offered]."

YV: "But I’m not going to betray my own view, that I honed back in 2010, that this country must stop extending and pretending, we must stop taking on new loans pretending that we’ve solved the problem, when we haven’t; when we have made our debt even less sustainable on condition of further austerity that even further shrinks the economy; and shifts the burden further onto the have nots, creating a humanitarian crisis. It’s something I’m not going to accept. I’m not going to be party to."

Kristjan said...

I was looking the show at the time and thinking that this guy and "his friends" will be gone soon. What will they accomplish? Well, they meet some high ranking EU officials, they become famous and they probably will sell books about this soon. I am relieved now that everyone is waiting for the book. There might even be some truth in that book, who knows. I am not getting one. Sorry for the cynicism.

Steve Keen was saying that YV made several proposals for parallel currency etc. There is some truth to that too but I remember his this comment: Grexit wll send us back to neolithic age

It is a smart thing to say that you are against Grexit and then say you are for It, that way you can please both sides. Any way, you get the message