Yanis Varoufakis's Blog, page 3

What’s behind Trump’s tariff policy? Will it work? On BREAKING POINTS

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UNHERD’s Freddie Sayers interviews Y. Varoufakis & W. Munchau on Europe’s prospects in the era of Trump

UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers interviews renowned economist and former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis and Eurointelligence founder Wolfgang Münchau as they dissect the escalating trade war between Europe and the United States. With the US recently striking a so-called trade deal with the UK, and news of India signing a comprehensive agreement with the UK, tensions are soaring as Europe, China, and others threaten retaliation against President Trump’s aggressive tariffs. From economic fallout to geopolitical manoeuvering, they reveal why Europe risks losing ground and what’s at stake for the global economy in 2025.

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Some thoughts on the 80th Anniversary of Victory over Fascism

Eighty years ago today, the monstrous machinery of the Third Reich was finally ground to dust. The swastika was torn from the Reichstag, the death camps liberated, and Europe—bloodied, traumatised, but unbowed—emerged from history’s darkest night.It was not merely a military victory; it was the triumph of solidarity over fascism, of internationalism over racial tyranny, of humanism over industrial-scale slaughter.And yet—and yet—that magnificent victory, which we have every reason to remember and to celebrate today, proved that there is no such thing as a final victory against fascism, against misanthropy, in a world built on the systematic exploitation of People and Nature – a world not yet mature enough for Peace with Justice.It took no time after that magnificent victory against fascism for the victors to co-opt the defeated fascists to trounce freedom fighters who had fought against fascism. In Greece, in Vietnam, in Indonesia, in South Africa, across the West, the victors employed fascists to maintain the prewar colonial order, the prewar pseudo-liberal regimes whose economic and ethical bankruptcy had begat fascism.Today, fascism’s spectre is rising again. In Ukraine, in the same battlefields where it was crushed, Nazism lives on, armed to the teeth, striking out both from within the Azov Battalion and the Wagner Group. In the European Union fascism is back — not in jackboots and sieg heils, but in the xenophobic demagogues in our parliaments, in the militarised borders of Fortress Europe, in Europe’s rearmament madness, in Europe’s sickening support for the last Apartheid state’s genocide of the Palestinians.The defeat of Nazism was not the work of generals or politicians alone. It was the result of sacrifices by millions of unsung heroes—partisans, women and men resistance fighters, ordinary soldiers, the working women and men who starved and bled to break fascism’s spine. That is the legacy we must reclaim. Not the hollow nationalism of flag-waving, of military parades – but the radical, internationalist solidarity that once united the world against tyranny.Eighty years on, the fight is not over. Lest we forget fascism was not just defeated in 1945—it was out-organised, out-mobilised, out-dreamed. And if we are to defeat its heirs today, we must do the same.No pasarán—never again!

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Discussing Trump’s Economic Masterplan with David Marr, on ABC Late Night Live

Economist Yanis Varoufakis says we shouldn’t underestimate Trump – he has a plan to shock the global economy, force foreign countries to buy crypto-currency in return for a deal on tariffs, and ultimately pay down debt and keep the US dollar at the centre of the global financial system. But it’s a high risk strategy that also paves the way for the “tech bros” to make a lot of money.GUEST: Yanis Varoufakis, Professor of Economics at the University of Athens, Co-Founder of the political movement DiEM25 and author of  Technofeudalism – What Killed Capitalism.  PRODUCER: Catherine Zengerer

For the ABC site click here.

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NEOLIBERALISM IS DEAD. SAY HELLO TO TECHLORDISM – Project Syndicate op-ed & video

Neoliberalism was neither new nor particularly liberal when it prevailed 50 years ago. Its great advantage was its sharp deviation from classical liberalism. Even though it paid tribute to liberal thinkers, neoliberalism shared neither their method nor their concept of the market. Today, we are on the cusp of another, equally profound, ideological innovation.Unlike Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill, neoliberals felt no responsibility to demonstrate, theoretically or empirically, under what circumstances the unfettered market could be relied upon to transmute private profit-seeking into collective prosperity. The invisible hand was divine, infallible. Even when the market failed, they claimed, any attempt to correct it through some collective agency was doomed to fail more horribly. It was an attitude that suited Wall Street to a tee.The 1970s craved such doctrinal indifference to actual evidence about the consequences of fully deregulating financial markets. Once America had become a deficit country and President Richard Nixon delivered his shock by decoupling the dollar from gold in 1971, successive administrations chose to enhance US global hegemony by boosting – not curtailing – the country’s fiscal and trade deficits.Predictably, Wall Street banks were assigned the crucial role of recycling (into US Treasuries, equities, and real estate) the dollars foreign exporters were raking in as a result of America’s deficit-fueled demand for their wares. But, to do this – to become the hub of this audacious global surplus recycling scheme – the bankers had to be liberated from regulatory restraint, which meant that legislators and a public taught, since 1929, to fear an out-of-control Wall Street, had to be re-educated. Neoliberalism’s fundamentalist orthodoxy exalting the sanctity of deregulated markets, reflected in the growing influence of the “law and economics” movement, fulfilled that requirement perfectly.Today, the ascendancy of a new form of capital – cloud capital, or networked algorithmic machines that furnish its owners’ remarkable powers to modify our behavior – needs its own ideology to be fully liberated. I have called this new system technofeudalism – a mode of production and distribution which, powered by cloud capital, is replacing markets with cloud fiefs (like Amazon) and capitalist profits with cloud rents.To realize the full power of cloud capital, its owners (people like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk) require a new ideology. Just as Wall Street financiers needed neoliberalism after the Nixon shock, this new ideology must support cloud capital’s expanding domain in three ways.First, it must legitimize the colonization of human endeavor. Beginning with the relaxation of rules governing, say, self-driving vehicles and AI-driven medical and legal services, the ideology must justify the limitless replacement of fallible, recalcitrant humans by cloud capital-driven machines in every realm – including work that gives us pleasure (such as translating poetry) or that we should want to perform (such as raising children). The deeper cloud capital can penetrate tasks hitherto carried out by humans, the greater the cloud rents flowing to the technofeudal class.Second, the new ideology must legitimize the colonization of state institutions, especially the privatization of public data through its transfer to Big Tech’s cloud capital. It must, for example, justify Musk’s use of his Department of Government Efficiency to hook his cloud capital systems into various federal agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, or the hard-wiring by Thiel’s defense firm Palantir and Google of their interfaces into the Pentagon, making their cloud capital indispensable to the military-industrial complex.Third, it must legitimize the colonization of Wall Street. Zuckerberg was the first technofeudalist to try to create his own digital currency, Libra. Wall Street foiled him. But then Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now X, evolved into a bolder attempt to create an “Everything App” that challenges Wall Street’s payments monopoly. Encouraged by President Donald Trump’s executive order directing the Federal Reserve to create a strategic crypto reserve, Big Tech, seeking to provide unfettered cloud finance outside traditional financial markets, needs more than ever to justify the merger of its cloud capital with financial services.This new ideology is already here. I call it techlordism, a mutation of transhumanism – a creed that advocates blurring the lines between organic and synthetic until augmented humans achieve genuine freedom, or even immortality. Just as neoliberalism borrowed from classical liberalism but usurped it by adding a divinity (the infallible market), techlordism makes itself useful to cloud capital’s three-pronged colonization drive by replacing the neoliberal Homo Economicus with an amorphous “HumAIn” (a human-AI continuum).Technolordism also replaces neoliberalism’s divine being. The new divinity is the algorithm that renders the signaling functions of the decentralized market mechanism obsolete, yielding (in the image of amazon.com) a totally centralized mechanism for matching buyers and sellers.The repercussions of the societal transformation accelerated by techlordism are breathtaking. They include unprecedented macroeconomic instability (as cloud rents decimate aggregate demand), the demise of democracy, even as an ideal (a position advocated by Thiel, an early prophet of techlordism), and the end of universities (replaced by personalized AI-driven augmentations).In this light, Trump is a godsend to the technofeudalists. His agenda – fully deregulating their AI-driven services, bolstering crypto, and exempting their cloud rents from taxation – is supercharging cloud capital’s power to extract rents. For the new ruling class, whatever money they lose in the short run from Trump’s tariff delusions must seem like a magnificent long-term investment.

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NEOLIBERALISM IS DEAD. SAY HELLO TO TECHLORDISM

After 1971, neoliberalism was an ideology essential in legitimising the emancipation of financial capital from the regulatory shackles of the New Deal and the post-war Bretton Woods system.Today, a new form of capital is on the ascendancy and needs its own ideology to be fully liberated: cloud capital. Cloud capital has created a new system that is no longer predicated on markets or profit. I have called it Technofeudalism – a new mode of production and distribution that, powered by cloud capital, has replaced (a) markets with cloud fiefs (like Amazon) and (b) capitalist profits with cloud rents.Fully to realise the power of their cloud capital, the technofeudal lords (Bezos, Thiel, Musk etc.) needed a new ideology, just like the financiers needed (after the end of Bretton Woods) neoliberalism. So, what did they replace neoliberalism with? They replaced it with the ideology of techlordism.Techlordism replaces neoliberalism’s liberal individual with an amorphous HumAIn (a human-AI continuum).Techlordism also replaces neoliberalism’s fundamentalist belief in the divine mechanism of the market with another divinity: the algorithm that bypassed the signal processing functions of the decentralised market mechanism, yielding a perfectly centralised mechanism for matching buyers and sellers.In this light, Trump is to the technofeudal lords, the cloudalists, nothing more than a useful tool. He is useful to them in that his policies (full deregulation of their AI-driven ‘services’, along with massive tax cuts for the cloudalists) supercharge the capacity of their cloud capital to extract more cloud rent from the rest of the economy.So, in this context, losing money from Trump’s tariff extravaganza in the short run is a tiny price to pay for a massive long term ‘investment’ in their technofeudal empire.

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‘Democracy under fire’: My remarks at the London Press Conference on the Vanishing Right to Protest (11-4-2025) alongside Juliet Stevenson, Holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos, Jeremy Corbyn, Chris Nineham and Ben Jamal

We are here today because democracy is on death row, because the treasured right to dissent is at gunpoint, because your capacity to do journalism is under fire.I remember when I came to Britain as a student in 1978 how overjoyed I was to be in a country where I felt safe from the secret police, happy to be living in a democracy where dissent was protected. Back then, I recall Mick McCaughey – the legendary Scottish miners’ union leader – warning me: “Don’t take it for granted my lad”, he said. “If democracy threatens to change anything, they will ban it.” I must say I did not believe him. I did not want to believe him. Today, his words are ringing true across this land, indeed across the West.The West has not recovered from the Crash of 2008. Donald Trump, the British government’s current fiscal mess, Europe’s stagnation, trade wars that are – in reality – vicious class wars – these are all mere symptoms of the wholesale disintegration of the realm of financialised, globalised capitalism that prevailed in the 1970s, riding on the coattails of the Nixon Shock.The more concentrated power has become the more brittle its foundations are proving.The more brittle its foundations are proving the more determined the powers-that-be become to shut down debate, dialogue, democracy.This is why the chilling winds of totalitarianism are blowing harder than ever today.Here in Britain. In Germany. In France. In the United States.The use of Newspeak is truly meant to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.Just as in the 1930s, a moral clarifier has emerged: Then, you were marked as a problem if you did your duty to defend Jews from Oswald Mosley’s and Adolf Hitler’s brownshirts. Today, you are marked as a problem if you defend Palestinians’ right to exist as Palestinians. The point, as in the 1930s, is to contain dissent.Fear of incarceration, of deportation, of exclusion is meant to enhance self-censorship and narrow down the range of dissent.The narrowing of the range of dissent is meant to narrow the range of what can be thought.The narrowing of the range of what can be thought, of what can be imagined, is essential in maintaining control by a regime that is losing control of its own faculties, of its own system.This is why the system’s political handmaidens in government are working hard to ensure that protest is turned from a fundamental right into a gift from the state.Perhaps the most remarkable method by which democracy is strangled is this phoney clash between Trumpists, who wax lyrical about free speech of bigots, and the centrists who present themselves as the protectors of core democratic principles. The case of Julian Assange demonstrates perfectly both sides’ hypocrisy.Was it not Trump, Biden, Johnson and Starmer who joined forces to criminalise Julian’s brilliant, accurate, essential journalism?Are Trump and Starmer not buddies in how they criminalise those of us who refuse to consent to the Palestinian genocide, including our heroic Jewish comrades?Was it not the whole gamut of the German political centre complicit in banning me from Germany because we dared collaborate with German-Jewish comrades, heroes like Iris Hefetz and Udi Raz, to hold a conference in Berlin under the utterly subversive title “A Just Peace in the Middle East”?With around forty peaceful left-wingers in prison, here in Britain, today, for the dastardly crime of organising protests that once upon a time would have been considered perfectly legitimate, I feel privileged to appear in front of you here today, honoured to be sitting next to Stephen Kapos and to Chris Nineham in a bid jointly to proclaim and to ring alarm bells:that democracy is on death rowthat the treasured right to dissent is at gunpointthat your capacity to do journalism is under fire.It is time we took a stand.It is time you took a stand.If not now, tomorrow may well prove too late.

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Yanis Varoufakis on Tony Benn’s legacy – 11 APRIL 2025, audio

On 11th April 2025, Melissa Benn, Jeremy Corbyn and Yanis Varoufakis addressed an audience at the University of Westminster dedicated to the memory of Tony Benn – almost 100 years from his birth. This is what Yanis had to say about Tony’s legacy at that event. (Click icon above for audio)

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On the political economics and the history behind Donald Trump’s tariff war – Politics JOE

In this interview with Oli Dugmore, for Politics JOE, I had a chance to lay out – in around 30 minutes – the political economics and economic history behind Donald Trump’s tariff war. As I said to Oli, those of us who oppose Trump have a duty to understand what his team are up to and the huge precedent of their project in the form of the Nixon Shock of 1971. If we shirk that responsibility, and just portray Trump’s people as mere idiots, we are bound to languish in error and prove highly ineffective in opposing Trump.

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Forget shares, bonds and tariffs. Here is what you should really worry about

While waiting for the EU’s response to the Trump Shock (don’t hold your breath for evidence of intelligent life from Brussels…), those of you who really want to worry about something big, turn your attentions to perhaps the largest threat for the status quo – greater than tariffs, equities, bond prices etc. What is that? The Fed’s swap lines!What saved capitalism (at least for a little while) after the Crash of 2008? Besides China (yes, China saved the capitalist world’s bacon by boosting magnificently its aggregate investment to take up the massive slack developing in the North Atlantic), the answer is: The Fed’s swap lines (i.e., the fact that, without second thought, the Fed lent the central banks of Europe and Japan something like $600 billion).Something similar happened in 2020, as the pandemic spread panic and chaos through the West’s financial circuits (on that occasion, the Fed’s swap lines funnelled around $450 billion to a world dependent on the mighty dollar).In this context, hotheads who think that Europe and Japan can afford to play tough with Washington seem unable to fathom the extent of their dependency. For the time being, Trump does not control the Fed. Or so it seems. But is it not possible that the Fed will not want to antagonise him? Is it, therefore, not possible that the Fed may not be as quick to ‘lubricate’ its swap lines at the drop of a hat (as it did in 2008 and 2020) when they are most needed?Just the thought that, come the next crunch, a certain reluctance may prevail at the Fed over its use of the swap lines that keep the financial markets liquid is enough to make the tumult of the past week look like a serene walk in the park.The moral of the story for European, British and Japanese decision-makers, both in the public and in the private sector, is: There is a price to pay for your total dependence on a fickle hegemon. Only now you are beginning to get a whiff of how steep that price is.Have a good morning!

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