Director's Chair: Yanis Varoufakis - The Global Minotaur and The True Origins of the Financial Crisis. In this four-part INET “From the Director’s Chair” interview, INET Executive Director Robert Johnson talks with Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis about Varoufakis’s new book The Global Minotaur: America, The True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy. “The Global Minotaur” is Varoufakis’s metaphor that tells the story about “what went wrong in 2008 and why the world economy is finding it so hard to rediscover its poise after the debacle in 2008.”
After refusing a multilateral, more democratic exchange regime post-WW II, the US eventually became the world’s buyer of last resort. But how to finance America’s growing trade deficits? Feed the beast, says Varoufakis, drawing parallels to the story from Greek mythology about the Minotaur who had to be fed human sacrifices as tribute. Part 1: The Global Minotaur Part 2: Bankruptocracy Part 3: The Two Faces of the Crisis Part 4: Europe by (Mis)Design Click here to order Varoufakis's book, The Global Minotaur.
Modern Political Economics: Making Sense of the Post-2008 World. INET Spotlight: Yanis Varoufakis. What to do with Europe? Pick one: federalize or impose austerity. Or ask Yanis Varoufakis, who picks neither. The professor of economic theory at the University of Athens offers a modest proposal for helping to tackle this Euro Zone conundrum. Don’t worry about federalizing Europe now and don’t cling to the current course of imposing austerity that no one really believes will work. “This is a false dilemma,” Varoufakis says in his presentation titled “Ringfencing Europe” at INET’s Berlin conference.
Speaking on the “Future of Europe” panel, Varoufakis makes the case that “there are steps we can take to ringfence Europe now.” In his pragmatic and bold plan, Varoufakis acknowledges the stark political realities of the present situation in Europe and works from there. As for the banks, Varoufakis says, “this is a debacle.” Given that a European federal government is not politically feasible, the Europe-wide tools that are available need to be leveraged as much as possible. The Global Minotaur. In this remarkable and provocative book, Yanis Varoufakis explodes the myth that financialisation, ineffectual regulation of banks, greed and globalisation were the root causes of the global economic crisis.
Rather, they are symptoms of a much deeper malaise which can be traced all the way back to the Great Crash of 1929, then on through to the 1970s: the time when a 'Global Minotaur' was born. Just as the Athenians maintained a steady flow of tributes to the Cretan beast, so Europe and the rest of the world began sending incredible amounts of capital to America and Wall Street. Thus, the Global Minotaur became the 'engine' that pulled the world economy from the early 1980s through to the financial collapse of 2008. Today's deepening crisis in Europe is just one of the inevitable symptoms of the weakening Minotaur; of a global 'system' which is now as unsustainable as it is imbalanced. Reviews 'If you want to know how serious the current crisis is, you should read his book.
Yanis Varoufakis. Yanis Varoufakis. The New Priesthood: An Interview with Yanis Varoufakis Part I. Yanis Varoufakis is a Greek economist who currently heads the Department of Economic Policy at the University of Athens. From 2004 to 2007 he served as an economic advisor to former Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou. Yanis writes a popular blog which can be found here. His treatise on economic theory ‘Modern Political Economics: Making Sense of the Post-2008 World’, co written with Nicholas Theocrakis and Joseph Haveli is available from Amazon. Interview conducted by Philip Pilkington. Philip Pilkington: Without getting into too much technical detail what is it that you refer to in your book Modern Political Economics: Making Sense of the Post-2008 World the ‘inherent error’ in all economic theories and models? Yanis Varoufakis: The essence of the economists’ inherent error is that they erred into thinking it is possible to tell a credible story about how values and prices are formed in complex (multi-sector) economies that grow through time.
PP: That’s really twisted. YV: Quite so.