The Global Minotaur Quotes

“Most politicians cannot be theorists. First, because they are rarely thinkers; second, because the frenetic lifestyle they impose on themselves leaves no time for big ideas. But most of all because to be a theorist you have to admit the possibility of being wrong – the provisionality of knowledge – and you know you cannot spin your way out of a theoretical problem.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy

“Had history been democratic in its ways, there would have been no farming and no industrial revolution. Both leaps into the future were occasioned by unbearably painful crises that made most people wish they could recoil into the past.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy

“Regular crises perpetuate the past by reinvigorating cycles which started long ago. In contrast, (capital-C) Crises are the past's death knell. They function like laboratories in which the future is incubated. They have given us agriculture and the industrial revolution, technology and the labour contract, killer germs and antibiotics. Once they strike, the past ceases to be a reliable predictor of the future and a brave new world is born.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy

“... toxic derivatives were underpinned by toxic economics, which, in turn, were no more than motivated delusions in search of theoretical justification; fundamentalist tracts that acknowledged facts only when they could be accommodated to the demands of the lucrative faith. Despite their highly impressive labels and technical appearance, economic models were merely mathematized versions of the touching superstition that markets know best, both at times of tranquility and in periods of tumult.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy

“leverage – a fancy term for good old debt.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy

“Not all of the New Dealers, it must be said, bought into the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. For instance, Henry Wallace, the former vice president and secretary of agriculture, who was fired by Truman for disagreeing with the Cold War’s imperatives, referred to the Marshall Plan as the ‘Martial Plan’. He warned against creating a rift with America’s wartime ally, the Soviet Union, and remarked that the conditions attached to the Soviet Union’s invitation to be part of the Marshall Plan were intentionally so designed that Stalin would be obliged to reject them (which, of course, he did). A number of academics of the New Deal generation, among them Paul Sweezy and John Kenneth Galbraith, also rejected Truman’s cold-warrior tactics. However, they were soon to be silenced by the witch-hunt orchestrated by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his House Committee on Un-American Activities.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy

“Corporations are forced, by competition and by the fear of predators, to try to turn workers into machine-like production units; to make the hiring of a worker no different from the hiring of an electricity generator. And yet, however hard they try to turn humans into machines and to extract output from their ‘work’ (in the same way as they extract effort from a horse or electricity from a generator), it is an impossible task. The worker cannot discard her innate human quirks, rebelliousness, indeterminateness – not even if she honestly wants to. All the things that make her contribution to production inherently unpredictable are part of who she is.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy

“Could the Crash of 2008, then, be nothing more than our periodic chance to realize how far we have allowed our will to be subjugated to capital? Was it a jolt that ought to awaken us to the reality that capital has become a ‘force we must submit to’, a power that developed ‘a cosmopolitan, universal energy which breaks through every limit and every bond and posits itself as the only policy, the only universality, the only limit and the only bond’?”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy

“And here lies a delicious paradox: consent grew more powerful the more economic life was financialized. And as finance grew in importance, the more prone our societies became to economic crises. Hence the interesting observation that modern societies tend to produce both more consent and more violent crises.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy

“The first sin, which took the form of a mathematized rhetoric, lulled authorities and academics into a false belief that financial innovation had engineered risk out of the system; that the new instruments allowed a new form of debt with the properties of quicksilver. Once loans were originated, they were then sliced up into tiny pieces, blended together in packages that contained different degrees of risk,3 and sold all over the globe. By thus”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy

“Condorcet suggested that ‘force cannot, like
opinion, endure for long unless the tyrant extends his empire far enough afield to
hide from the people, whom he divides and rules, the secret that real power lies
not with the oppressors but with the oppressed’. The ‘mind forg’d manacles’, as
William Blake called them, are as real as the hand-forged ones.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy

“All dynamic societies founded their success on two production processes that unfolded in parallel: the manufacturing of a surplus and the manufacturing of consent (regarding its distribution). However, the feedback between the two processes grew to new heights in the Age of Capital. The rise of commodification, which also led to the flourishing of finance, coincided with a subtler, more powerful, form of consent. And here lies a delicious paradox: consent grew more powerful the more economic life was financialized. And as finance grew in importance, the more prone our societies became to economic crises. Hence the interesting observation that modern societies tend to produce both more consent and more violent crises.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy

“The CDOs that sliced up and then spliced together disparate debts belonging to a heterogeneous multitude of families and businesses were put together on the basis of certain formulae, whose purpose was, supposedly, to calculate their value and their riskiness. These formulae were developed by financial engineers working for Wall Street (e.g. for J. P. Morgan, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, etc.). To render the formulae solvable, certain assumptions had to be made. First and foremost was the assumption that the probability that one slice of debt within a CDO would go bad was largely unrelated to the probability of a similar default by the other slices in the same CDO. That is, it was assumed that what happened in 2007–08 was…impossible! That it was unnecessary to factor in the possibility of some crisis, during which Bob lost his house for reasons that increased the chances that Jane would lose her job and eventually also default on her mortgage.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy

“The Global Plan’s most impressive feature was its incredible adaptability – successive US administrations amended it every time bits of it came unstuck. Their policies toward Japan are an excellent example: after Mao’s unexpected victory, and the demise of the original plan to turn the Chinese mainland into a huge market for Japanese industrial output, US policy makers responded with a variety of inspired responses.

First, they utilized the Korean War, turning it into an excellent opportunity to inject demand into the Japanese industrial sector. Secondly, they used their influence over America’s allies to allow Japanese imports freely into their markets. Thirdly, and most surprisingly, Washington decided to turn America’s own market into Japan’s vital space. Indeed, the penetration of Japanese imports (cars, electronic goods, even services) into the US market would have been impossible without a nod and a wink from Washington’s policy makers. Fourthly, the successor to the Korean War, the war in Vietnam, was also enlisted to boost Japanese industry further. A useful by-product of that murderous escapade was the industrialization of South East Asia, which further strengthened Japan by providing it, at long last, with the missing link – a commercial vital zone in close proximity.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy

“Topsy’s execution was a move on an oversized chessboard between two industrial behemoths. Edison’s invention of the light bulb had been only the first step in creating electricity generating stations and the network of wires which took that electricity into every American home to light up the bulbs produced en masse by his own factories. Without control of the generation and distribution of electricity, his bulbs would not have made him King of the Electron. Thus occurred the so-called War of the Currents against his great adversary, George Westinghouse.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy

“Edison epitomized the new entrepreneur at the heart of a brand-new phase in the development of market societies: an inventor who innovated in order to create monopoly power for himself – not so much for the riches that it provided, but for its own sake; for the sheer glory and the sheer power of it all. He was an entrepreneur who inspired, in equal measure, incredible loyalty from his overworked staff and loathing from his adversaries. He was a friend of Henry Ford, who also famously played a key role in bringing machinery into the lives of ordinary people while, at the same time, turning workers into the nearest a person can come to a machine.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy

“It is not at all an exaggeration to suggest that the Third World debt crisis was the colonized world’s second historic disaster (after the brutal experience of colonization and the associated slave trade). In fact, it was a disaster from which most Third World countries have never quite recovered.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy

“Notice the irony: in a world ideologically dominated by monetary conservatism, and ringing with long sermons about the perils of printing money, the effective money supply had been turned over to privateers [private banks] bent on flooding the markets with money of their own making [ex. CDOs, which act as stores of value + means of exchange]. How did this differ, really, from handing the Fed’s printing presses over to the mafia? There is not much difference, is the honest answer.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy

“Indeed, a persuasive case can be made that [the Minotaur] played a major part in the defeat of America’s greatest foes – the Soviet Union and its satellites, as well as those non-aligned Third World regimes that had become too uppity in the 1960s. Key to this triumph was not so much the successful pursuit of the arms race, but rather the humble US interest rates – those very same rates whose phenomenal rise under Paul Volcker had assisted the Global Minotaur’s birth.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy

“Thinking that it had successfully diffused risk, our financialized world created so much that it was consumed by it.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy

“John Maynard Keynes made the most audacious proposal that has ever reached the bargaining table of a major international conference: to create an International Currency Union (ICU), a single currency (which he even named – the bancor) for the whole capitalist world, with its own international central bank and matching institutions. Keynes’ proposal was not as impudent as it seemed. In fact, it has withstood the test of time quite well. In a recent BBC interview, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF’s then managing director, called for a return to Keynes’ original idea as the only solution to the troubles of the post-2008 world economy.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy

“Corporations are forced, by competition and by the fear of predators, to try to turn workers into machine-like production units; to make the hiring of a worker no different from the hiring of an electricity generator. And yet, however hard they try to turn humans into machines and to extract output from their ‘work’ (in the same way as they extract effort from a horse or electricity from a generator), it is an impossible task. The worker cannot discard her innate human quirks, rebelliousness, indeterminateness – not even if she honestly wants to. All the things that make her contribution to production inherently unpredictable are part of who she is. Independently of her will, one moment she is capable of sloth and the next of brilliant creativity (which no machine can ever understand).”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy

“John Maynard Keynes made the most audacious proposal that has ever reached the bargaining table of a major international conference: to create an International Currency Union (ICU), a single currency (which he even named – the bancor) for the whole capitalist world, with its own international central bank and matching institutions.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy

“Take, for example, Vlasic pickles, a well-known everyday brand. Walmart’s ‘innovation’ was to sell these pickles in one gallon (3.8 litre) jars for $2.97. Was this a shrewd retailer’s response to market demand? No it was not. Who would want to buy almost four litres of pickles? Few family fridges had the necessary room for such an item. So what was the selling point? It was the idea of a huge quantity at an ultra-low price. Walmart’s customers, in this sense, were not buying pickles as such. They were buying into the symbolic value of cheapness; into the notion of having appropriated so many pickles for so little money. Indeed, it made them feel as though they were Walmart’s accomplices – in association with an icon of American corporate might, they had forced”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy

“Unlike those corporations that focused on building a particular brand (e.g. Coca-Cola or Marlboro), or companies that created a wholly new sector by means of some invention (e.g. Edison with the light bulb, Microsoft with its Windows software, Sony with the Walkman, or Apple with the iPod/iPhone/iTunes package), Walmart did something no one had ever thought of before: it packaged a new ideology of cheapness into a brand that was meant to appeal to the financially stressed American working and lower-middle classes.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy

“By year’s end, on 31 December, the New York stock exchange has lost more than 31 per cent of its total value since 1 January 2008.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy

“Question: Do the machines depicted in the economy of The Matrix produce value? The answer, of course, depends on what value means and how it differs from price. One definition of value is the price towards which the actual price tends under normal market conditions. Another derives from the idea that the value of things reflects the true costs of producing them. One thing is certain: just like love, poetry, porn and beauty, one knows value when one sees it, even if one finds it impossible to define it analytically.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy

“Loans and workers are necessary evils whose ‘services’ businesspeople hire only for what they can get out of them: profit. But then profit can only be envisaged if the level of overall (or aggregate) future demand is strong. Unfortunately, the future is unknowable. The only thing business folk know for sure is that demand is never strong for long at a time of falling wages and interest rates. The result is an interesting, albeit tragic, conundrum: at a time of recession, when there is a mounting glut of labour and uninvested savings, a reduction in wages and interest rates does not help. In fact, it deepens the recession.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy

“capital also instils illusions in our minds – above all, the illusion that, in serving it, we become worthy, exceptional, potent. We take pride in our relationship with it (either as financiers who ‘create’ millions in a single day, or as employers on whom a multitude of working families depend, or as labourers who enjoy privileged access to gleaming machinery or to puny services denied to illegal migrants), turning a blind eye to the tragic fact that it is capital which, in effect, owns us all, and that it is we who serve it.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy

“Whether they win or lose their fight with the Euro institutions, Syriza have demonstrated the power of theory. Varoufakis predicted the catastrophic end of the Greek bonanza, the unsustainability of leveraged finance and the fragmentation of the eurozone – even while the theories acceptable to the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times said the opposite. He also told his advisers, from the very beginning, that they could expect a deal with Europe only at ‘one minute past midnight’. That is, he theorized the potential accidental outcomes of the crisis too. That’s what gives this book both its power and its poignancy. We don’t know how the fight between Syriza and the eurozone will end – but we can be certain it will involve compromise. Politicians live in the world of compromise; theorists do not. But by the end of it, the radical left will know what it means to fight for a new, fairer kind of capitalism, in the teeth of resistance from the old kind. Paul Mason, 28 March 2015”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy