Yanis Varoufakis's Blog, page 71
December 9, 2019
EVERYTHING’S ON THE UP WITH THE TORIES – Brian Eno’s new song for this Thursday’s general election
Everything’s on the UP with the Tories the gap between the richies and the poories the porky pies and fabricated storiesYes – everything’s on the up with the Tories
Everything’s up the creek with the Blue Boys
They’re selling off the NHS to cowboys
They’re cutting back on nurses (but investing it in hearses) the nitwits and the we-don’t-have-a-clue boys
Everything’s on the UP with the Tories
With unemployed across all categories Johnson, Gove, Patel – it’s a government from Hell!And a few more years of Brexit purgatory
Everything’s on the up with the Righties
Who worship at the feet of Trump Almighty
There’s people in the street without a bloody crust to eat
But everything’s on the up for the Tories
If you’re Eton, Winchester or Harrow
The road to the future, though narrow leads – like a well aimed arrow -right to the bottom of the barrel
We’re scraping the bottom of the barrel!!
Everything’s on the UP with the Tories their red-tops farting out more made-up stories, they’re proudly on the wrong side of history
But everything’s on the UP, everything’s on the UP, everything’s on the UP, with the Tories
December 8, 2019
Labour’s Manifesto is fit for purpose. So, why are the middle classes so hostile to it? THE NEW STATESMAN
What are we to make of a political class that proclaims its ethical commitments but that cannot bring itself to endorse the only concrete actions that would honour them?
This general election is unique in ways that transcend Brexit. Over the decades that I have been observing British politics, never before have I witnessed a consensus so widespread and powerful regarding the country’s urgent needs and priorities. And never before has the Labour Party presented a manifesto, buttressed by the leadership’s will to implement it, that promises real change in accordance with that consensus. And yet, despite this rare alignment, never before have the influencers that speak on behalf of Britain’s educated middle classes turned so viciously against a Labour Party that has done so much to address their own agenda.
Britain’s educated middle classes have, indeed, reached an impressive consensus. They worry about the climate emergency and accept the need for the state to act decisively in a world whose sustainability is jeopardised by Trump-like politicians and corporate-driven inertia. They concede that inequality has become obscene and is now hollowing out the social contract on which civilisation depends. They accept that the City of London remains a clear and present danger to the real economy, draining resources and perpetuating instability. They acknowledge that austerity is nothing more than a self-defeating fiscal policy masking a toxic class-war against the weaker citizens. They disdain Boris Johnson’s playful treatment of the facts and run scared of what a Tory Brexit will mean for their children’s access to European institutions, for the NHS, and for the UK’s capacity to resist the suffocating embrace of Trump’s US.
Meanwhile, the Labour manifesto will be remembered, irrespective of the electoral outcome, as a most worthy blueprint for tackling these concerns. From an economic perspective, it is a measured, bold, well-targeted and moderate financial response to the UK’s urgent needs and abundant capacities. For instance, the plan to establish a National Investment Bank, which can soak up excess liquidity from the financial system and create sustainable growth and high-quality, green jobs. Or the idea of ending the private oligopoly over broadband and transforming it into a public good that boosts the productivity of hitherto deprived citizens and small businesses. Or the proposal to finance the investment drive by asking those who benefited inordinately for decades to contribute more tax, effectively the social contract insurance premium they have been skimping on for so long.
From a social perspective, the Labour manifesto directly addresses that which the chattering classes have long demanded: providing better social care and more council houses, ending the heavy burden of debt for young people who dare enter university, and abolishing the zero-hour contracts that are a source of guilt even for the affluent.
From an environmental perspective, Labour’s manifesto includes the greenest, most radical plan offered by a major party anywhere in the world. Besides setting ambitious targets for reducing carbon emissions, it provides a means of financing the new institutions necessary for the green transition.
And then there is Brexit. What has been the chief demand of England’s political centre in recent years? To rule out a hard Brexit and to hold a second referendum that features Remain as an option. Once Johnson turned hard Brexit into an imminent reality – one still looming after the end of the mooted transition in December 2020 – Jeremy Corbyn did as he promised. He began campaigning for a second referendum that offers the good people of the UK two non-lethal options: a soft Brexit (with the UK remaining in the customs union and, mostly, the single market) or full EU membership.
And there’s the rub. While Labour’s manifesto is uniquely tailored to the concerns of Britain’s so-called middle ground, never before has that territory been more hostile to Labour. This is a phenomenon that will be remembered in decades to come as the great 2019 British paradox. Unpacking it holds the key to grasping Britain’s current predicament.
If you ask the commentariat for an explanation of this paradox, you will get an earful of chatter about Corbyn’s Marxism, alleged anti-Europeanism and lack of character. However, the truth is simpler and uglier than any of this. From day one, after he won Labour’s leadership in 2015, the game was afoot. Soon after Corbyn became leader, I warned that a huge campaign of character assassination was inevitable. It was not difficult to see it coming.
Social democratic parties, like Labour, were tolerated to the extent that they tinkered around the edges of a socio-economic order. But after the financial crash of 2008, Corbyn emerged and turned Labour into a threat to the privileged classes. While the liberal bourgeoisie are happy to romanticise the plight of the poor, and disparage social injustice, they are keener to write off as passé, or even dangerous, any sensible programme for ending inequality at an industrial scale.
In so doing, they erode liberalism’s claim, on which effective governance depends, to represent all citizens, as opposed to merely a few. But such is life in the conflicting mindset of a ruling class that has lost the capacity to reproduce sustainably its own regime.
What are we to make of a political class that proclaims its ethical commitments but that cannot bring itself to endorse the only concrete actions that would honour them? As John von Neumann, the great mathematician turned Cold War warrior, once said of J Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, “some people profess the guilt to claim credit for the sin”. It is the duty of progressives uninterested in the reproduction of the current reality to give Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party the electoral victory it richly deserves.
For the NEW STASTEMAN’s site click here
Is capitalism past its expiry date? Munk Debate (K, Vanden Heuvel & Y. Varoufakis vs A. Brooks & D. Brooks)
For my 3 minute conclusion of this debate, jump to 1 hour 59 minutes
There is a growing belief in western societies that the current capitalist system no longer works for average people. Economic inequality is rampant. Life expectancy is falling. The environment is being destroyed for profits. Political power is wielded by wealthy elites and big business, not the people. For capitalism’s critics, the answer is a top to bottom reform of the “free market” along more socialist and democratic lines. For proponents of capitalism, it is the engine of economic and social progress, full stop. Not only has capitalism made all of us materially better off, its ideals are responsible for everything from women’s rights to a cleaner environment to greater political freedoms. The answer to society’s current ills is more capitalism, more economic freedom, and more free markets.
THE DEBATERS
Katrina vanden Heuvel is the editorial director and publisher of The Nation, a leading American source of progressive politics and culture, and served as the magazine’s editor from 1995 to 2019. She is a frequent TV news commentator on U.S. and international politics, and she writes a weekly column for The Washington Post.
Yours truly…
Arthur Brooks is a Harvard professor, bestselling author and a Washington Post columnist. He left college age 19 to work professionally as a classical musician. In his late 20s, he earned a bachelor of arts in economics, mathematics and modern languages by correspondence. He got a master’s degree in economics at Florida Atlantic University and a PhD in public policy at the RAND Graduate School in Santa Monica.
David Brooks is an American cultural and political commentator who was born in Canada when his father was earning his PhD at the University of Toronto. He is a bi-weekly columnist for The New York Times’ op-ed pages and a regular analyst on PBS NewsHour and NPR’s All Things Considered
For the site of the Munk Debates click here
https://munkdebates.com/debates/capit...
November 21, 2019
Labour’s 2019 Manifesto: My assessment on BBC Radio 5, 21 NOV 2019
Independently of what one thinks of Corbyn and McDonnell (Nb. my friendship and comradeship with both is well known), most people agree that:
Exceptional investment in the green transition and technologies, possibly of a level not seen since the post-war reconstruction, is our generation’s duty to the next. A large carbon tax on those who profit from heating up the planet is both fair and logical.
Unbearable levels of inequality, and homelessness need to be reversed.
The botched privatisations of rail, water, mail and energy call for re-nationalisation.
Labour’s 2019 Manifesto addresses all of these tasks by making the top 5% of the population, who have increased their share of national wealth scandalously during the last decade of deep stagnation, pay a fair amount.
Labour’s 2019 Manifesto is, thus, the most responsible policy agenda that has been offered to voters in a long, long time. A breath of fresh air… as I said earlier today on BBC Radio 5
Why is economics not a force for good and what must we do to make it so? Cambridge 8th NOV 2019
The Cambridge Circus and the Reinvention of Economics , November 8-9, 2019, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge
Convenor: Antara Haldar (Cambridge)
The Concept
Cambridge has been home to some of the most fundamental scientific breakthroughs in history—from gravity to evolution to the discovery of DNA. Yet no less significant is its role in shaping the discipline that, increasingly, forms the organising logic of every aspect of society: economics. Originally taught as a part of the “moral sciences”—alongside psychology and philosophy—it is the birthplace of modern economics; the site of invention of everything from the demand and supply curves to macroeconomics. Even while becoming increasingly algebraic, however, the Cambridge School, at the height of its glory, treated economists, in Keynes’ words, as “mathematician, historian, stateman and philosopher.” In the post-war world, led now by a different Cambridge—on the other side of the Atlantic—the rupture between economics and all else was more radical. But the epistemic elitism of the Boston Brahmins of economics, modelling the subject on physics or engineering, a priesthood closely guarding its secrets from the arts, humanities and even the rest of the social sciences, has had dire consequences for the world around it—resulting in untenable levels of inequality, the rise of populism, seismic shifts in the global economy and the biggest global financial crisis since the Great Depression. The “Common Currency” project at Cambridge’s Centre for Research in the Arts Social Sciences and Humanities, will confront the grave dangers of the current crisis in economics—and seek to shatter the existing epistemic silo. By bringing together, in an initial opening event fifteen to twenty of the most significant thinkers within the academy—and beyond—it will attempt to join the dots between advances at the frontiers of economics (in behavioural, institutional and information economics, for instance), but also link the discourse of economics with the broader conversation and strive to locate, once again, its emotional pulse. It will, thus, engage—in addition to economists—philosophers, sociologists, psychologists and historians, as well as artists, writers, activists and, crucially, the public. The dialogue will lead to the publication of a collection of essays, and, equally, art installations, theatre workshops, films and strategic media partnerships. The goal is to create the nucleus for a conversation around which an eventual epistemic revolution in the discipline can crystalise—one that is monumental enough to respond to the fierce urgency of the empirical challenges of today’s world posed by climate change and the rise of AI, rather than devoted to mere methodological tweaking. The event will lead to the adoption of the “Cambridge Declaration on Economics” outlining a bold new paradigm for a more “embedded” mode of value-based economic analysis—motivated by the idea that economics is far too important to be left to economists alone. In the golden age of Cambridge economics, the future of the discipline was regularly debated by a core group of scholars: Keynes called this the “Cambridge Circus”. Seeking to reclaim Cambridge’s place in shaping global economic history—let’s bring the circus back to town!
Sophisticated Heretic – Interview with the Cambridge Union magazine TCS
Varoufakis is impressively historically literate: he folds contemporary political and economic events into their bigger intellectual history. He puts it that the huge discursive power of the medieval clergy has, in a modern context, been seized by economists. The go-to revolving door theory – where industrialists are recycled as industrial-legislators – is reimagined by Varoufakis as the emperor at the confessional ear of the archbishop: their power is co-dependent.
He suggests that the ‘supreme power’ of established economic thought and policy over our collective imagination is analogous to the hold of sacred words on medieval minds. That the people, in their own language, might begin to understand scripture was an unhinging prospect that terrified the Tudor establishment. Varoufakis ascribes the quasi-religious authority of received economic thought to the mystery of its language. He drops into his medieval history, perhaps pointing to role models, the term ‘sophisticated heretics’.
Image Credit: FlickrI asked him if the left today is open to intellectualism. He thinks the left has always been more welcoming than the right because, ‘all outsiders in human history have been more open to an intellectual reconfiguration and reconsideration of the status quo.’ But – never the politician – he pushes away an uncritical ideological spirit: ‘the left has also been responsible for immense acts of authoritarianism, and closing down debate, as it approached power. Power corrupts, and the left is not immune to that. So I am distinctly aware of the left’s proclivity towards modes of thinking that are just as oppressive as what we have today in the dominant paradigm.’
Toying with this urgent self-awareness, he turns on his new political party in Greece – MeRA, which is under the umbrella of his pan-European movement, DiEM or European Spring: ‘I watch how even small increases in our power, in our percentage in the polls, are always threatening us with a dissolution of friendship, of tolerance, of openness.’ Varoufakis holds up the flag of the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists as he likes its sophisticated symbolism: ‘[it] was black and red: they used to say red for the excitement, the hope, the revolutionary spirit in our heart, and black for the dark side that each one of us has.’
“I am an expert on economic theory,’ he says, ‘[but] that does not mean I am an expert on what needs to happen. That is very difficult.”
I find it difficult to see how these intellectually complex principles translate into his popular democratic movement, especially in the context of disinformation and a resistance to academically-informed discourse. ‘I am an expert on economic theory,’ he says, ‘[but] that does not mean I am an expert on what needs to happen. That is very difficult.’ He clarifies the difference I am trying to define between the academic and the political spheres: ‘In the academic sphere, the beauty of being in a place like Cambridge, is that at the level of research, you put forward your hypothesis, then you meet with your colleagues whose job it is to disprove it. It is only through this test, this trial, that good ideas survive and bad ideas die. This means that the greatest merit of being an academic must be an openness to criticism and a readiness to change your mind, which is exactly the opposite of being in politics. Imagine, instead of having a roundtable of academics where we are testing each other’s theories and trying to disprove them, that we have a roundtable with television cameras, with politicians. Just for a moment fantasise that you are in this conversation and your political opponent says something, and suddenly, you think: my God, that’s a good point! If you say so, you are gone. That really concerns me about politics.’
“Just for a moment fantasise that you are in this conversation and your political opponent says something, and suddenly, you think: my God, that’s a good point! If you say so, you are gone. That really concerns me about politics.”
He says that difference between the academic and the political is a very difficult difference to survive.
One feels that Varoufakis is up for the fight for that survival though. In the spirit of self-criticism, I wondered if he feared the risk as Finance Minister in communicating the complex idea of being at the same time a Europeanist whilst being a radically disruptive force in Europe, the risk of losing control of that narrative to the nationalists and the far right. ‘At every point: I still fear it’. Characteristic of his responses, he reserves political uniformity and gives a double critique of the Syriza project: ‘I think that on the one hand, when it came to the Greek people, we were very successful. Proof of that is that our narrative secured 36% of the vote in the January, and then a few months later, even though the banks were closed (and we were held responsible for that) and all of the media were lambasting us, we took that 36% to 62% of the vote. So, in our communication to the people of Greece, we were spectacularly successful.’ Of course, he checks his triumphalism though: ‘with many Europeans – not all, but many – the systemic media narrative prevailed. I still have to answer questions from journalists: ‘Mr Varoufakis, how dare you go against Europe?’ The answer is I did not.’
I put it to him that Jeremy Corbyn could have taken and led with that risk in the European debate in Britain, and Varoufakis is, for a moment, defensive. ‘He did.’ A quick clarification that he should have been more outright seems underplayed. ‘He showed a very sensible streak by saying: I am highly critical of this EU, but on balance, on the evidence, I think it would be hurtful for most of our people if we left.’ It is an unbrilliant logic that seems to lack Varoufakis’s usual brio, and I am unconvinced that Jeremy Corbyn posed the case for ‘radical Remain’ as well as Varoufakis has it that he did.
He talks me through what comes next for his European Spring movement, and he moves through its failures comfortably, admitting uncomplicatedly that the European Parliament elections this year were not a success for his movement. Varoufakis wants to keep the Green New Deal at the movement’s heart, and it makes sense to promote an issue, international by its very nature, in a political effort aimed at deleting political boundaries along conventional national borders.
This is a reconfiguration informed by his intellectual principles, which recognise the continuity between mathematics, metaphysics, politics, and the lists of other disciplines.
It appears from all of this that Varoufakis is training the modern left, building up its intellectual heft so that, so he says, it is ready for the next crisis. The left failed to enact a genuine paradigm shift after the 2008 financial crash, and Varoufakis seems furious at the wasted chance. He argues, in his conversation with Levi, for an ‘embrace of indeterminacy’. Varoufakis is calling for a sea change in our way of thinking, and it is a radically inspiring call. But, to the end, his principle checks even its own hope, and he questions his whole argument, that a radical departure can come from within the existing system: he is – charmingly – not so sure any more.
“But, to the end, his principle checks even its own hope, and he questions his whole argument, that a radical departure can come from within the existing system: he is – charmingly – not so sure any more.”
[For the TCS site please click here.]
November 13, 2019
My review of Banerjee & Duflo’s (this year’s Nobel winners in economics) latest book – The Observer
REVIEW: Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems, by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo
A recent YouGov survey confirmed that economists are the least trusted professionals in the UK today. Brexit is only the latest contributor to the public’s understandable rejection of a profession that has either failed spectacularly to raise the alarm over impending crises or have provided theoretical justifications for the inexcusable practices of bankers and the wild claims of politicians.
Who can forget the Queen’s devastating question, in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, to members of the Royal Economic Society: “Why did no one see it coming?” How can Nobel Prize winning economists be forgiven for providing the theoretical sermons that steadied the financier’s hand concocting the structured derivatives that Warren Buffet would later describe as “weapons of mass financial destruction”?
A new book, entitled Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems, is the latest attempt by professional economists to defend the profession. It is, happily, an excellent antidote to the most dangerous forms of economics-bashing: the attempts of opportunistic politicians to weaponise understandable discontent with mainstream economics and politics and to press it into the service of a xenophobic ideology that denies facts and serves the interests of a nativist, global oligarchy.
The book’s authors, MIT academic economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, write beautifully while in full command of their economics – a rare combination of skills. They look into the most crucial issues humanity faces (migration, trade wars, the scourge of inequality, climate catastrophe) with a combination of humility over what economics cannot tell us and pride over its contributions to our limited understanding. In every page they seek to shed much needed light upon the distortions that bad economics bring to the public debates, while methodically deconstructing their false assumptions. In their words, the book’s noble and urgent task is “…to emphasise that there are no iron laws of economics keeping us from building a more humane world”.
Serendipity would have it that, as this book was in the pipeline, Banerjee and Duflo, who are also partners in life, were awarded (jointly with Michael Kremer) this year’s Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Even if only for the good wind it will blow into this important book’s sails, the Prize Committee’s choice must be considered an inspired one.
Banerjee and Duflo are a new breed of economists. Unlike previous Nobel winners who were mostly older white males producing grand theories built upon mathematics of dizzying complexity, this year’s Nobelists are young and have made a name for themselves by studying poor brown people’s circumstances up close and personally. Most interestingly, they have specialised in borrowing the methods of randomised trials from medicine and deployed them in developing countries to ascertain what policies can alleviate suffering with given resources.
Their own conception of what economists should be doing is disarmingly down to earth. They see themselves as society’s “… plumbers: we solve problems with a combination of intuition grounded in science, some guesswork aided by experience and a bunch of pure trial and error.” A comparison with John Maynard Keynes’s conception of the study of economics is telling. Keynes thought that good economics required of us that we aim to be, at once, “mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher”. That we must “…contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought.” That we must remain “…as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet some-times as near the earth as a politician.”
While such lofty ambition implanted a dangerous delusion of grandeur amongst many of the economists whose theories have caused many people great hardship (for example, grand theorisers of the financial market’s supposed self-correcting capacities), there are passages in this book when this reader would have liked a little more of Keynes’ ambition. For without it the plentiful useful facts do not go far enough to expose the deeper causes of our current predicament. Similarly, while it is refreshing to encounter a genuine admission of ignorance (e.g. when the authors admit that economists are damned if they know what causes economic growth spurts in some places while other places remain stagnant), the umpteenth time I encountered the usual transition from “on the one hand” to “on the other hand”, I found myself yearning, like President Truman once did, for the… one-handed economist.
The book’s greatest contribution is the methodical deconstruction of prominent fake facts on the day’s critical issues: Migration, the reader finds out, is not on the rise – indeed, at 3% of global population it is exactly at the level it was in 1960. Natural experiments (involving Finns expelled from the USSR in 1945, Cubans flocking to Miami in 1980, Jews settling in Israel in the 1990s) prove that migrants do not steal the natives’ jobs, but only help expose the holes in public services and social housing left by austerity. As for trade liberalisation that economists treat as super-important, Banerjee and Duflo dare suggest it brings relatively small benefits while doing a lot of damage to the poorer and the weaker in countries like the United States and India. The resulting discontent in developed countries turbocharges racism: The moment white blue-collar men lose hope and apply for disability welfare benefits it is no longer enough to denigrate blacks and Latinos as “welfare queens”. They must now be depicted as gang members or rapists.
In the chapters on growth, inequality and climate change the reader comes closer to encountering the authors’ politics. While firmly on the side of progressives, and fully sympathetic with figures like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, their own policy stance is much more mainstream. They support schemes to help the victims of globalisation, e.g. by paying firms in declining areas to keep older workers employed. They want government in developing countries to help people move to areas with better jobs but also to help those who want to stay to look after their elderly or their village. In keeping with their academic work’s focus on things that work on the ground, they favour the smaller picture where they can be sure that public investment can make a difference. But what about the larger stage on which humanity’s drama unfolds?
Banerjee and Duflo consider Sanders’ Job Guarantee scheme but reject it because they do not believe worthy jobs can be produced by the state in such big numbers. Correctly, they point out that Warren’s wealth tax, while good and proper, cannot raise more than 1% of US national income, even less Ocasio-Cortez’s 70% marginal tax rate for the super-rich (which will simply motivate firms not to distribute profits but place them in trust funds). Alas, the fact remains that any serious tackling of climate change, or attempt to give social justice a chance, require spending in the vicinity of at least 5% of total income. So, where will the money needed for the International Green New Deal and the redistribution (both global and local) of wealth that humanity needs so desperately come from? Banerjee and Duflo do not say.
At some point they welcome a change of heart amongst IMF staffers: “The IMF now requires its country teams to include inequality in factors to take into consideration when providing policy guidance to countries and outlining conditions under which they can receive IMF assistance.” When I read this, I laughed thinking that someone must have forgotten to send this email to the IMF’s Greek mission! The reason I mention this titbit here is that it points to an explanation of their silence on how the Green New Deal will be paid for: A reluctance to break cleanly from the gravitational pull that the established institutions exert on successful academic economists, preventing them from countenancing public finance innovations that require an ambition closer to that of bigger picture thinkers (e.g. Franklin Roosevelt and John Maynard Keynes)
Every book as important as this one must include a theory of change: By what means shall we use the book’s insights to bring about a more humane world? The authors’ offering is enlightened selfishness by the rich (“The rich may eventually see that it is in their self-interest to argue for a radical shift toward the real sharing of prosperity”) and razor-sharp analysis that is disseminated to the public (“The only course we have against bad ideas is to be vigilant”).
This is unconvincing. But it could not be otherwise. To provide a persuasive internationalist progressive policy agenda at a time when the usual fixes (e.g. quantitative easing, taxation) no longer work, the deeper causes of capitalism’s economic stagnation and flirtation with climate catastrophe must come to the surface. To do this we have to reconsider that which polite society bans respectable economists from interrogating: property rights over the means of production, especially robots, AI etc.
It is a remarkable sign of the times that, as my friend Slavoj Zizek once said, even the brightest minds would rather fathom the end of the world than plan for the end of capitalism. Perhaps the greatest contribution of Banerjee and Duflo’s excellent new book is precisely this: It demonstrates both the brilliant insights that mainstream economics can make available to us and its limits – which a progressive internationalism has a duty to transcend.
“Should liberal capitalism be saved?”A debate between Martin Wolf & Yanis Varoufakis, Today, London, Wincott Foundation
The Foundation was set up in honour of Harold Wincott, who was widely regarded as the finest economic journalist of his day. Writing first in the Investors Chronicle and then, between 1950 and his death in 1969, in the Financial Times, Wincott argued persuasively for the virtues of liberal capitalism at a time when many policy-makers and economists looked to government intervention as the principal means of solving Britain’s economic problems.
With the idea of liberal capitalism again under attack, The Wincott Foundation has invited Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator of the FT, and Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek finance minister, to debate the question ‘Should liberal capitalism be saved?’ It promises to be a fascinating and lively exchange, moderated by Merryn Somerset Webb, editor-in-chief of Moneyweek and FT columnist.
The event will be attended by leading financial journalists, economists, business people and regulators. An audio transcript of the debate will be published on this site.
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