Yanis Varoufakis Quotes & Sayings

Once their gaze turned back toward Europe, the puzzle dissolved: West Germany was the obvious equivalent and, indeed, a splendid candidate for the role of the global plan's European shock-absorbing pillar - certainly not Britain. — Yanis Varoufakis

European Union partners never said European Union partners're going to renege on any promises, European Union partners said that European Union partners promises concern a four-year parliamentary term, european Union partners will be spaced out in an optimal way, in a way that is in tune with our bargaining stance in Europe and also with the fiscal position of the Greek state. — Yanis Varoufakis

In occupied Iraq, the introduction of new paper money took almost a year, 20 or so Boeing 747s, the mobilisation of the U.S. military's might, three printing firms, and hundreds of trucks. — Yanis Varoufakis

Even though I resigned as Papandreou's adviser early in 2006 and turned into his government's staunchest critic during his mishandling of the post-2009 Greek implosion, my public interventions in the debate on Greece and Europe have carried no whiff of Marxism. — Yanis Varoufakis

We will compromise and compromise and compromise but we will never be compromised. — Yanis Varoufakis

Germany is Europe's heart. But bitterness is widespread. Currently the Germans hate the Greeks and the Greeks hate the Germans. The demonization of the country has to stop if we want a strong Europe. So I am setting a positive example. — Yanis Varoufakis

All dynamic societies founded their success on two production processes that unfolded in parallel: the manufacturing of a surplus and the manufacturing of consent (regarding its distribution). — Yanis Varoufakis

Toxic derivatives were underpinned by toxic economics, which, in turn, were no more than motivated delusions in search of theoretical justification; fundamentalist tracts that acknowledged facts only when they could be accommodated to the demands of the lucrative faith. Despite their highly impressive labels and technical appearance, economic models were merely mathematized versions of the touching superstition that markets know best, both at times of tranquility and in periods of tumult. — Yanis Varoufakis

My hope that Thatcher would inadvertently bring about a new political revolution was well and truly bogus. All that sprang out of Thatcherism were extreme financialisation, the triumph of the shopping mall over the corner store, the fetishisation of housing and Tony Blair. — Yanis Varoufakis

In a move that will remain in Irish annals as a stigma comparable to the potato famine, the Dublin government succumbed to ECB blackmail: make the German creditors of Ireland's commercial banks whole, even a bank that was closed down and thus no longer systemically important for Ireland's financial sector, or else. — Yanis Varoufakis

This book originally aimed at pressing a useful metaphor into the service of elucidating a troubled world; a world — Yanis Varoufakis

This strategy, which was then used as the template for the rest of the European periphery, turning the majority of European states into what I jokingly refer to as Bailoutistan, was always going to backfire on the European economy. Tim Geithner and Jack Lew, his successor in the US Treasury Department, understood this well. They shared the concern that what started in Greece in 2010, with the combination of an absurd bailout and a hideous level of austerity, has put Europe into a position that undermines America's recovery and threatens the prospects of China, Latin America, even India and Africa. — Yanis Varoufakis

Years of crisis have culminated in a Europe that has lost legitimacy with its own citizens and credibility with the rest of the world. — Yanis Varoufakis

Greece was merely the laboratory where these failed policies were being tested and developed before their implementation everywhere across Europe. — Yanis Varoufakis

I will not contest my parliamentary seat in a sad election that will not produce a Parliament capable of endorsing a realistic reform agenda for Greece. — Yanis Varoufakis

In 1950 the European Union was officially born in the form of a German-dominated cartel of coal and steel, run of course by a cross-border French-dominated administration located in Brussels. Its name? The European Steel and Coal Community. — Yanis Varoufakis

Fences and borders are a sign of weakness. — Yanis Varoufakis

When Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he famously replied that "it would be a very good idea. — Yanis Varoufakis

The social inefficiency of capitalism is going to clash at some point with the technological innovations capitalism engenders, and it is out of that contradiction that a more efficient way of organising production and distribution and culture will emerge. — Yanis Varoufakis

Regular crises perpetuate the past by reinvigorating cycles which started long ago. In contrast, (capital-C) Crises are the past's death knell. They function like laboratories in which the future is incubated. They have given us agriculture and the industrial revolution, technology and the labour contract, killer germs and antibiotics. Once they strike, the past ceases to be a reliable predictor of the future and a brave new world is born. — Yanis Varoufakis

Berlin has traditionally backed a rules-based eurozone in which every member state is responsible for its own finances, including bank bailouts, with political union limited to a fiscal overlord's possessing veto power over national budgets that violate the rules. — Yanis Varoufakis

There are few occasions in any argument where one side is completely right and the other comprehensively wrong. This is one of them. Jack Lew's Treasury was spot on and the German response utterly ludicrous. The US Treasury Department's underlying analysis was founded on basic macroeconomics that Berlin, and the Eurogroup (as I have personally witnessed), refuses to acknowledge. — Yanis Varoufakis

General Motors is alive and kicking today, it is because in 2009 President Obama's administration wrote off 90 percent of its debt. — Yanis Varoufakis

You are of course right, Yanis. These targets that they insist on can't work. But, you must understand that we have put too much into this programme. We cannot go back on it. Your credibility depends on accepting and working within this programme.2 So, there I had it. The head of the IMF was telling the finance minister of a bankrupt government that the policies imposed upon his country couldn't work. Not that it would be hard to make them work. Not that the probability of them working was low. No, she was acknowledging that, come hell or high water, they couldn't work. With — Yanis Varoufakis

The euro is a hybrid of a fixed exchange-rate regime, like the 1980s ERM or the 1930s gold standard, and a state currency. — Yanis Varoufakis

Europe has twice already in the past hundred years dragged the planet down into appalling quagmires. It can do so again. Europe (as the New Dealers understood in the 1940s) is too important to leave to us Europeans. The whole world has a stake in a victory for rationality, liberty, democracy and humanism in the birthplace of those ideas. — Yanis Varoufakis

But unlike Nevada, Ireland had to fend for itself when it came to propping up its banks and paying its unemployment benefits. Lacking a printing press, it had to go cap in hand to the money markets to borrow huge quantities of money that, in Nevada's case, had been paid for at the federal level. — Yanis Varoufakis

Had history been democratic in its ways, there would have been no farming and no industrial revolution. Both leaps into the future were occasioned by unbearably painful crises that made most people wish they could recoil into the past. — Yanis Varoufakis

Ironically, the rise of the Tea Party increased the interventions of the Fed that the movement denounced. — Yanis Varoufakis

In the case of the Irish banks, the private bonds that they had purchased were uninsured. In the case of Greek state bonds, their buyers also knew that these were Greek law contracts, meaning that they could be given a haircut (written down) by a future stressed Greek government. This is precisely why the interest rates were higher than in Germany. Higher risk, higher rewards. As long as the gamble was paying off, the German bankers reaped benefits that they shared with no one. But when the gambles turned bad, as Irish banks and the Greek state failed, they demanded that the taxpayers of Greece and Ireland pay up, as if they had bought insurance from them. — Yanis Varoufakis

In brief, it is now clear that Europe's religious dedication to rules is nothing but a veil under which the strong make up the rules as they go along to suit their own political agenda. Perhaps that would be fine if the said agenda was not quick-marching Europe and the global economy into an economic, political and moral morass. — Yanis Varoufakis

If the 'Athens Spring' - when the Greek people courageously rejected the catastrophic austerity conditions of the previous bailouts - has one lesson to teach, it is that Greece will recover only when the European Union makes the transition from 'We the states' to 'We the European people.' — Yanis Varoufakis

Every non-Marxist economic theory that treats human and non-human productive inputs as interchangeable assumes that the dehumanisation of human labour is complete. But if it could ever be completed, the result would be the end of capitalism as a system capable of creating and distributing value. — Yanis Varoufakis

I was told once by a leftwing scholar that as a Marxist, you have to do two things: always be optimistic and always have a view about everything. That advice still sounds good to me. — Yanis Varoufakis

How can a radical scepticism about the state be squared with a religious dedication to the notion that market outcomes are, by definition, optimal? — Yanis Varoufakis

My first encounter with Marx's writings came very early in life, as a result of the strange times I grew up in, with Greece exiting the nightmare of the neofascist dictatorship of 1967-74. — Yanis Varoufakis

By year's end, on 31 December, the New York stock exchange has lost more than 31 per cent of its total value since 1 January 2008. — Yanis Varoufakis

I'm the finance minister of a bankrupt country — Yanis Varoufakis

The many refugees are not a Greek or German problem. They are a European problem. We should therefore develop a common strategy. That's why I am launching a cross-border movement for more democracy. — Yanis Varoufakis

Anyone who toys with the idea of cutting off bits of the eurozone hoping the rest will survive is playing with fire. — Yanis Varoufakis

We Greeks are the blacks of Europe. — Yanis Varoufakis

Game theorists analyze negotiations as if they were split-a-pie games involving selfish players. — Yanis Varoufakis

I plan to concentrate on helping set up a Pan-European political movement, inspired by the Athens Spring, that will work toward Europe's democratization. — Yanis Varoufakis

For some reason, lots of terrible things start here and then spread. The Cold War was one. It didn't start in Berlin - it started in Athens in December 1944; the contagion in the eurozone started here in 2010. We are perfectly capable as Europeans of messing things up unnecessarily. — Yanis Varoufakis

While it would have been straightforward, and perfectly legal, to allow Irish banks or the Greek state to default to their private creditors (so as to respect the no-bailout clause), the authorities' guilty desire to bail out the German and French banks (without telling taxpayers that this was what they were doing) led to the need to violate the no-bailout rule by concocting another rule: the no-default rule, which was never part of Europe's original set of rules. (...) Both the freshly minted no-default rule and the original no-bailout clause were political whims of the strong disguised as legal constraints upon the weak. In reality, the strong break their rules at will and concoct new rules whenever they think it suits them. — Yanis Varoufakis

Bankruptocracy is as much a European predicament as it is an American 'invention.' The difference between the experience of the two continents is that at least Americans did not have to labour under the enormous design faults of the eurozone. — Yanis Varoufakis

They are unanimous in their hate for me; and I welcome their hatred. (quoting FDR announcing the Second New Deal, 1936) — Yanis Varoufakis

In other words, the uninsured private bankers had to be bailed out illegally and utterly unethically. But the taxpayers who were forced to carry that can should not even be given better terms for repaying the odious, private debt they were forced to acquire in order to bail the bankers out. — Yanis Varoufakis

Nothing is more boring than talking to people who share my opinion anyway. — Yanis Varoufakis

Every sensible banker understands that Greece should not have received any more money: a bankrupt state that can never be expected to repay loans is not a good debtor. — Yanis Varoufakis

The economic crisis has weakened the EU for years. — Yanis Varoufakis

Corporatists like Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet were bent on constructing the Brussels-based bureaucracy as a democracy-free zone. — Yanis Varoufakis

Simple logic dictates that if you cannot even conceive the possibility of leaving a negotiation, then it is preferable never to enter one. — Yanis Varoufakis

Count Coudenhove-Kalergi put it succinctly in one of his speeches when he declared his ambition that Europe "supersedes democracy" and that democracy be replaced by a "social aristocracy of the spirit."52 — Yanis Varoufakis

If the British think they can simply detach from the continent and sail towards the USA or China, then they are mistaken. — Yanis Varoufakis

Alas, this was an open invitation to print one's own money! No wonder Warren Buffet took one look at the fabled CDOs and described — Yanis Varoufakis

I don't believe a Brexit will hurt the City of London as one of the largest financial centers in the world. — Yanis Varoufakis

It is the mark of ancient societies that contemporary tribulations reinvent old fears. — Yanis Varoufakis

At a time of recession, when there is a mounting glut of labour and uninvested savings, a reduction in wages and interest rates does not help. In fact, it deepens the recession. — Yanis Varoufakis