And the Weak Suffer What They Must? - the book

Mark Lawson, in today’s Guardian, previews my Annual Shakespeare Rose Lecture, ahead of tonight’s delivery. He begins with its title ‘Shake the Superflux’ and the statement: ‘The beauty of King Lear is that it encourages us to think about inequality’.

Yanis Varoufakis has emerged not only as an embattled finance minister, iconoclastic economist, and co-founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM25), but a life-long lover of Shakespeare. He called the Greek debt crisis ‘a Shakespearean tragedy’, reported that observing the European Union is ‘like watching Othello’, and compared the world’s Deep Establishment to Shylock and Macbeth. Those who sold out were ‘like Richard III’, or Lady Macbeth saying ‘What’s done cannot be undone’.

Adults In The Room: My Battle With Europe’s Deep Establishment
Yanis Varoufakis
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28.00 (cloth)

Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece and author of “Adults in the Room: My Battle with the European and American Deep Establishment,” explains that the rise of Donald Trump and the alt-right is a symptom of the failure of the establishment and liberal capitalism. Following is a transcript of the video.

ATHENS – Europe is at the mercy of a common currency that not only was unnecessary for European integration, but that is actually undermining the European Union itself. So what should be done about a currency without a state to back it – or about the 19 European states without a currency that they control?
The logical answer is either to dismantle the euro or to provide it with the federal state it needs. The problem is that the first solution would be hugely costly, while the second is not feasible in a political climate favoring the re-nationalization of sovereignty.

Click here for The Guardian site. Or…
Writing a book should be a life-changing experience for its author. This book was no exception: it was as if, halfway through writing it, the subject matter jumped off the page and demanded a real-life response. I soon found myself in the belly of the beast I had been writing about.

by Eric Reguly for The Globe and Mail Having lost the old fight over Greece’s financial future, Mr. Varoufakis is focused on a different cause: preserving the European Union Click here for The Globe and Mail site and here for a pdf … Continue reading →

The book will be launched at 19.00 on 12th December 2016 at Parnassos Hall, Plateia Karitsi 8. Speakers include Nicholas Theocarakis (University of Athens), Thanos Mikroutsikos (Composer) and Kostas Vaxevanis (Journalist and publisher). Video messages by Noam Chomsky, James K. … Continue reading →

On 4th December 2016 I delivered the keynote at the RiskMinds International risk management conference in Amsterdam. A summary of my talk, compiled by the organisers, follows. What’s worse? Being a finance minister of a bankrupt state, or a risk … Continue reading →