A technical failure foretold? Varoufakis’ interrupted BBC TV interview on the… BBC’s bias
Posted: June 20, 2012 Filed under: Politics | Tags: debt, Varoufakis Leave a comment »You may recall that on Greek election day I issued a missive to the BBC, suggesting that they recover forthwith the journalistic standards which they seemed to have dropped in the run up to the Greek election. That missive, might I add, came from a long standing friend and contributor to the BBC. Indeed, I hold the Beeb in the highest regard and always sided with it in the face of BBC-bashing (especially in the UK). So, it was with great relief that I received a call from their TV News Dept offering me a chance to make my point on camera. But as I was coming to that point, the link surreptitiously caved in. Now, I have no doubt that it was, most probably, a genuine technical failure. Having said that, the fact that I was not given a chance to complete my point at a later stage raises questions. Questions that some in Greece have put in the form of this video. (Nb. the text that someone pasted on the screen below the moment of the ‘technical glitch’ says: “The weather in Germany probably cause the link to fail; to be followed by a recapitulation of the German narrative”)
My final message to the Beeb, on this issue, is: Greek election day was not your finest hour.
Varoufakis reply to Mr Nowack, Deutsche Bank exec, who argued in favour of expelling Greece from the euro (On CBC Radio)
Here is Varoufakis’ reply to Wolfgang Nowak, Deutsche Bank executive and former Merkel advisor, telling CBC that Greece should be thrown out of the Eurozone. Click here for Mr Nowak’s audio
Greece’s PSI is Dead on Arrival
Posted: January 13, 2012 Filed under: Economy, EU | Tags: PSI, Varoufakis Leave a comment »
An error in search of a rationale but also a failure that may prove a harbinger for the Modest Proposal
By Yanis Varoufakis*
Originally published at yanisvaroufakis.eu
A brief history of Greece’s PSI
In the beginning there was Wholesale Denial. Then the Denial began to subside under the weight of circumstances. It did so slowly, agonizingly so, with the result that, in the process, Greece lost any capacity it might have had to rebound. It also caused the Crisis to spread like a bushfire throughout the eurozone, turning liquidity problems into unyielding insolvencies first in Ireland, then in Portugal. Still, to this day, Denial is in the air. But it cannot remain intact, without the whole eurosystem crashing and burning. The Greek PSI may be the harbinger of denial’s end. If not, it is hard to see what will stop the juggernaut of the Crisis from destroying the few chances the euro has of survival. Read the rest of this entry »
The Penny Is Dropping:
Posted: June 24, 2011 Filed under: Economy, EU, International, Politics | Tags: Varoufakis Leave a comment »Mervyn King, Daniel Gros, Jim O’Neill, and the increasing relevance of the Modest Proposal
26JUN http://yanisvaroufakis.eu
This blog has been risking its readers’ sanity by repeating ad nauseam, and in a myriad different guises, the claim that the euro crisis is, at root, a chain of bank insolvencies causally attached to another (derivative) chain of member-state insolvencies. And that, as such, all attempts to deal with the resulting Crisis by rivers of liquidity (to the banks by the ECB and to the states by the EFSF/IMF/ECB/EU) are bound to worsen the problem. So, when Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, said the following a few days ago, I found it hard to fight off a creeping sense of gratification:
“Right through this crisis from the very beginning … an awful lot of people wanted to believe that it was a crisis of liquidity. It wasn’t, it isn’t. And until we accept that, we will never find an answer to it. It was a crisis based on solvency … initially financial institutions and now sovereigns.” [See his speech by which he presented the Bank's first report on financial stability after the formation of a new tailor-made financial policy committee.]
A few posts back I had entitled an entry “The Penny may be dropping?” I think it is time to remove the qualifying ‘may be’ with an emphatic ‘is’. Mervyn King (not renowned for his radical tendencies or for his mingling with odd characters like your truly) confirms this by weighing in decidedly on the side of those of us who have been arguing for more than 18 months now that Europe’s commitment to denial is putting the global economy at risk. King summed it up thus:
(a) The current euro crisis is systemic and the greatest threat to the UK banking sector yet,
(b) “[P]roviding liquidity can only be used to buy time”, (c) “… [T]he belief, ‘oh we can just lend a bit more’, will never be an answer to a problem which is essentially one about solvency.”
While the mantra of ‘lending a bit more’ is reaching a climax these days (with another €100 billion being touted for bankrupt Greece), the debate on how to get out of this cul-de-sac is intensifying. FT Alphaville put it less than tactfully:You have “to be dropping acid” to think that the current policies will work. Read the rest of this entry »
