Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe's Deep Establishment

by Yanis Varoufakis

The insiders, for their part, follow a sacrosanct rule: never turn against other insiders and never talk to outsiders about what insiders say or do. Their reward? Access to inside information and a chance, though no guarantee, of influencing powerful people and outcomes.’

The EU began as a cartel of big business limiting competition between central European heavy industries and securing export markets for them in peripheral countries such as Italy and, later, Greece. The deficits of countries like Greece were the reflection of the surpluses of countries like Germany.

The same three French banks’ loans to the Italian, Spanish and Portuguese governments alone came to 34 per cent of France’s total economy

Upton Sinclair once said, ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.’

Austerity is a morality play pressed into the service of legitimizing cynical wealth transfers from the have-nots to the haves during times of crisis, in which debtors are sinners who must be made to pay for their misdeeds.

Catherine the Great once said that if you cannot be a good example, then you will just have to be a horrible warning.

Indeed, perpetual bonds issued at the time of the South Sea Bubble in the 1720s and by Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill during and just after the Great War were only repaid by the British Treasury in late 2014 and early

Greece has endured six consecutive years of recession, the loss of 28 per cent of its national income, more than one in five workers losing their job, and an unemployment rate propelled from 7 to 27 per cent, with youth unemployment at more than 65 per cent.

Doing my sums with Glenn’s help, it turned out that for 2015 alone the Greek state needed €42.4 billion just to roll over its debts, the equivalent of 24 per cent of national income.

Oscar Wilde’s quip about democracy was at the back of my mind: ‘It is impractical, and it goes against human nature. This is why it is worth carrying out.’

Henry Ford’s sales pitch for the Model T: you can have it in any colour you wish as long as it is black.

Henry Kissinger for this diplomatic technique: ‘constructive ambiguity’. This was our immediate task.

‘Keep in mind that the ruling class can be self-destructively mad; not just pretending!’