Adults in the Room

September 1, 2017
A Greek economist-turned-politician looks at the neoliberal forces arrayed against the developing world, from the central banks to the European Union."Greeks did splendidly when we lived austere lives, when we spent less than we earned, when we channeled [sic] our savings to the education of our children," said incoming finance minister Varoufakis (Economics/Univ. of Athens; And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future, 2016, etc.) on the surprise victory of the leftist Syriza Party in the spring of 2015, in a time when it seemed that Greece was on the verge of leaving the EU. The sentiments were conservative--until, that is, the author went on to say that austerity is one thing, while "Ponzi austerity" is quite another, and that his government had no intention of giving the country's oligarchs and wealthy tax evaders a free ride on the backs of the Greek people. Public austerity imposed by the World Bank and other outside institutions in order to prevent the Greek economy from failing, he argued, was destroying private parsimony, and off he went to Brussels and Berlin to argue a kind of neo-Keynesian case before the country's key creditors. He received little sympathy from the likes of Merkel, Macron, and America, though privately, officials told him that the demands for austerity were unreasonable and doomed to fail. Indeed, although President Barack Obama had said "you cannot keep on squeezing countries that are in the midst of depression," U.S. Treasury actively opposed Greek efforts to set their own house in order. The story is a tangled one full of many threads both political and economic--and even historical, since Varoufakis traces some contemporary domestic issues to the dawn of the Cold War and a Greece torn between East and West. It helps to have both a scorecard and an economics degree to follow some of the thornier arguments on debt structure and liability management, but this is an eye-opening look at the recent economic crisis in the eurozone.

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October 16, 2017
Former Greek finance minister Varoufakis, a highly unorthodox, colorful, and fearless figure, here chronicles his and his country’s battles with the leaders of the troika (the European Commission, the EU’s executive body; the European Central Bank; and the International Monetary Fund) during the 2014–2015 stages in his country’s ongoing debt crisis. He blasts the European powers-that-be for what he calls “Bailoutistan,” whereby several huge loans allegedly for Greece’s benefit largely went to the country’s creditors. Meanwhile, under the troika’s austerity regimen, the country’s net income dropped. Varoufakis extensively documents his clashes and periodic, almost always abortive attempts at cooperation with troika leaders, most interestingly with imperious German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble. His subtitle is misleading, as there’s little here about America’s leaders and nothing about its “deep establishment” (a term Varoufakis leaves unexplained); this is a book about intra-European economic battles. Unfortunately, Varoufakis sometimes doesn’t explain arcane terms—how many readers will know what “EFSF debt” refers to? He is also prone to providing excessive detail, making this otherwise illuminating account far too long for all but those with a passionate interest in EU economic affairs in general and the seemingly interminable Greek debt crisis in particular.