The Global Minotaur: A theory of the Global Crisis

 “I wanted a Germany that was hegemonic and efficient, not authoritarian and caught up in a European Ponzi scheme. That was in 2013.” Excerpt from the Munich Seminar.

Our theme is a wall. A wall that is neither some ordinary physical structure at a specific site, nor a symbolic wall. It takes a material form in sites around the globe while transcending locations and leapfrogging whole continents as if in a strange quest to globalise itself, to infect our supposedly unifying world with a sinister, impenetrable division – a wall that is so familiar and yet so inconvenient that most gaze away from it.

Ladies and Gentlemen, my heartfelt thanks for your presence here tonight. Thanks also to the good people at South Bank who honoured me with the humbling idea and invitation to combine my own musings on globalisation with the remarkable images of Andreas Gursky – images which have, over the years, done so much to enlighten us regarding the topsy-turvy world that we have been helping bring about. Yes, a picture is a thousand words but, at the same time, words liberate  our mind’s eye so that it can make sense of otherwise incomprehensible images.

Join economist and Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) co-founder Yanis Varoufakis for a keynote talk on the economic force that has shaped our world: globalisation.

Donald Trump is perhaps the US president best equipped to understand that some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall. His personal business plan always involved racking up enormous deficits and debts, before finding a way to unload them on to others – his employees and creditors mostly. Last week the US president imposed tariffs on steel and aluminium imports.

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

Back in 1991, a left-wing friend expressed his frustration that “really existing socialism” was crumbling, with exaltations of how it had propelled the Soviet Union from the plough to Sputnik in a decade.

I remember replying, under his pained and disapproving gaze: “So, what? No unsustainable system can be, ultimately, sustained.” Now that globalization is also proving unsustainable, and is in retreat, its liberal cheerleaders resemble my friend when they proffer similarly correct, yet irrelevant, exaltations of how it lifted billions from poverty.

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.

In this BBC World at One program dedicated to the Crash of 2007-8, I try, in the space of two and a half minutes, to explain why those momentous events, ten years ago, changed the world in a manner that it no longer makes sense in terms common prior to 2007. Of why I claim that 2007/8 was to capitalism what 1991 was to socialism

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