Below is an interview with Professor of Economics at the University of Athens, Yanis Varoufakis which I recorded on Wednesday the 14th of September in Leinster House. Michael Taft, Research Officer with Unite the trade union was also on hand to ask some questions.
Yanis is the author of several books, two which were published during the summer, The Global Minotaur: America, The True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy, published by Zed Books, and a course text book, Modern Political Economics: Making Sense of the Post-2008 World, co-authored with Joseph Halevi and Nicholas J. Theocarakis (published by Routledge).
Yanis also has a popular blog on which he has been proselytising regularly about the current Eurozone crisis, but more particularly outlining again and again the solution which he and his co-author Stuart Holland call The Modest Proposal.
With Yanis’ permission we have been publishing some of these posts which we hope, in a small way, helps get these ideas out to a wider audience. But for those who are not regular readers here is a good recent analysis of the crisis at the moment (Is Greece Finished?), and here is a detailed recent post explaining the modest proposal and why alternative Eurobonds will not work.
We started the discussion by asking about what austerity is doing to Greece at the moment, a topic, considering how much attention the country is getting, that is generally ignored in the mainstream press. The conversation then moved on to the crisis in the Eurozone, Eurobonds, the strawman Eurobond arguments, the insolvency of European banks, proved by the pumping of US dollars into them by the ECB, his Modest Proposal and why Germany refuses to consider a Eurobond where each Eurozone country would have the same rate of interest. It’s 49 minutes long and starts (and ends) with Hero, from Neu!75.
I’d like to thank Yanis for allowing us to interview him.
[display_podcast]
Latest posts by Donagh (see all)
- The policy of transferring incomes to capital and the rich - September 6, 2012
- ILR Will Not Blink While Facing Down the Jaws of Excessive CPU Usage - September 6, 2012
- Dan Froomkin | The Jobs Crisis Obama, Romney and the Low-Wage Future of America - August 29, 2012
- Money as a Social Construct – Talk Given by Mary Mellor - August 27, 2012
- - August 23, 2012
September 18, 2011 12:16 am
Thanks for this. His talk that night at the public meeting was very good. Loads of people turned away.
December 5, 2011 9:42 pm
Varoufakis modest proposal contains some serious errors that negate the main gist of his thesis. A critique is published on http://andreaskoutras.blogspot.com/2011/12/critique-on-modest-proposal-of.html