English

Italian daily Il Fatto Quotidiano interviewed me (see here) regarding the latest developments in Italy, Europe and Greece. The original Q&A (in English) follows:

Greece is about to exit from the notorious memorandum, the austerity plan signed with the troika. Public finance has improved at a high price for the population as we all know.

Yanis Varoufakis discusses his books, Adults in the Room and Talking to my Daughter About the Economy, at Politics and Prose on 10th May 2018

Brexit rode to victory on the coat-tails of a type of discontent whose power sprang from its insuperable reluctance to specify its nature. Seemingly focused on a foreign power centre that British voters saw (with some justification) as the usurper of their democratic rights, its real focal point was nebulous and imprecise enough to encompass a potent mix of grievances.

Alternate Current Radio Presents: Boiler Room – Uninterruptible Talk Radio on ACR Hesher, Spore, Jay Dyer, Max, Randy J and Infidel Pharaoh form the Alternate Current Radio Brain-trust for this edition of Boiler Room. On this episode the social rejects club is boiling down the erosion of language, the weaponization of popular terminology, the Rosanne Barr Twitter kerfuffle, the Monsanto Bayer merger and much more.
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Italy should be doing well. Unlike Britain, it exports considerably more to the rest of the world than it imports, while its government spends less(excluding interest payments) than the taxes it receives. And yet Italy is stagnating, its population in a state of revolt following two lost decades.

Corriere Della Sera, the Italian daily, published today an interview that I gave to Aldo Cazzullo. For the published version (in Italian of course), you can visit the paper’s site here. However, the published text is a heavily reduced version of the exchange between Mr Cazzullo and myself. For those interested in the full exchange, see below. (Nb. the exchange took place in English)

JOHANNESBURG – One of the most common mistakes European leaders make in interpreting US President Donald Trump’s hostility toward America’s traditional allies, or the alacrity of his administration’s efforts to blow up the international order, is to assume that all of this is unprecedented. Nothing could be further from the truth.

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Rome, July 24, 2015
To Yanis Varoufakis and Dominique Strauss-Khan
Dear Yanis, dear Dominique,
There is a place on earth that represents Europe’s very roots: Greece. Let us begin there.
Athens, April 28, 1955. Albert Camus’ conference on “The future of Europe”.[1]
On this occasion, participants agreed that the structural characteristics of European civilization are essentially two: the dignity of the individual; a spirit of critique.

Much of the world was introduced to Yanis Varoufakis in early 2015, when, as Greece’s bold new finance minister (he rode a Yamaha to work and tabloids touted his sex appeal), he led negotiations with the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund to restructure the country’s crushing load of government debt. To many, he was a leftist hero standing up to the heartless eurocrats in Brussels. But then the eurocrats won.

I concede that there are issues over which I would welcome the Italian President’s use of constitutional powers that (in my humble opinion) he should not have.(*)  One such issue is the outrageous policy of the Lega and the promise of its leader, Mr Salvini, to expel five hundred thousand migrants from Italy. Had President Mattarella refused Mr Salvini the post of Interior Minister, on the basis that he rejects such a monstrous project, I would be compelled to support him. But, no, Mr Mattarella had no such qualms.