And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future Quotes

“As Tony Benn, the British Labour politician, once suggested, we should constantly ask those who govern us five questions: What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“Leonard Schapiro, writing on Stalinism, warned us that “the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade. But to produce a uniform pattern of public utterances in which the first trace of unorthodox thought reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“General Motors is alive and kicking today, it is because in 2009 President Obama’s administration wrote off 90 percent of its debt.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“To put it slightly differently, small sovereign nations, like Iceland, have choices to make within the broader constraints created for them by nature and by the rest of humanity. However limited these choices might be, Iceland’s body politic retains absolute authority to hold their elected officials accountable for the decisions they have reached within the nation’s exogenous constraints, and to strike down every piece of legislation that it has decided upon in the past. (...) In this sense, small, powerless Iceland continues to enjoy full sovereignty while the comparatively omnipotent European Union has been stripped of all forms of sovereignty.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“ALEXIS DE TOQUEVILLE once wrote that those who praise freedom only for the material benefits it offers have never kept it long.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“And so it turns out that all talk of gradual moves toward a political union and toward “more Europe” are not first steps toward a European democratic federation but, rather, and ominously, a leap into an iron cage that prolongs the crisis and wrecks any prospect of a genuine federal European democracy in the future.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“This is what they came up with in lieu of a solution: The ECB allowed the Greek government to issue worthless IOUs (or, more precisely, short-term treasury bills), that no private investor would touch, and pass them on to the insolvent Greek banks.21 The insolvent Greek banks then handed over these IOUs to the European System of Central Banks22 as collateral in exchange for loans that the banks then gave back to the Greek government so that Athens could repay the ECB.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“Count Coudenhove-Kalergi put it succinctly in one of his speeches when he declared his ambition that Europe “supersedes democracy” and that democracy be replaced by a “social aristocracy of the spirit.”52”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“Corporatists like Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet were bent on constructing the Brussels-based bureaucracy as a democracy-free zone.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“In the case of the Irish banks, the private bonds that they had purchased were uninsured. In the case of Greek state bonds, their buyers also knew that these were Greek law contracts, meaning that they could be given a haircut (written down) by a future stressed Greek government. This is precisely why the interest rates were higher than in Germany. Higher risk, higher rewards. As long as the gamble was paying off, the German bankers reaped benefits that they shared with no one. But when the gambles turned bad, as Irish banks and the Greek state failed, they demanded that the taxpayers of Greece and Ireland pay up, as if they had bought insurance from them.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“In a move that will remain in Irish annals as a stigma comparable to the potato famine, the Dublin government succumbed to ECB blackmail: make the German creditors of Ireland’s commercial banks whole, even a bank that was closed down and thus no longer systemically important for Ireland’s financial sector, or else.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“When Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he famously replied that “it would be a very good idea.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“While it would have been straightforward, and perfectly legal, to allow Irish banks or the Greek state to default to their private creditors (so as to respect the no-bailout clause), the authorities’ guilty desire to bail out the German and French banks (without telling taxpayers that this was what they were doing) led to the need to violate the no-bailout rule by concocting another rule: the no-default rule, which was never part of Europe’s original set of rules. (...) Both the freshly minted no-default rule and the original no-bailout clause were political whims of the strong disguised as legal constraints upon the weak. In reality, the strong break their rules at will and concoct new rules whenever they think it suits them.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“Few progressive Europeans would argue against a democratic United States of Europe, with a proper government elected on a pan-European ticket and answerable to a proper parliament vested with complete sovereignty over all decisions and matters. But this is pure wishful thinking. The sobering reality is that it is not in the European Union’s DNA naturally to evolve into a federation.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“But this was not a bailout. Greece was never bailed out. Nor were the rest of Europe’s swine—or PIIGS as Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain became collectively branded. Greece’s bailout, then Ireland’s, then Portugal’s, then Spain’s were rescue packages for, primarily, French and German banks. In bending its rules to rescue the PIIGS’s private banks (with the issue of the aforementioned IOUs), the ECB had given Chancellor Merkel and France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy some respite from having to go back to their parliaments for more taxpayers’ money for French and German bankers. But much more was now needed.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“Of course what the German tourists never saw was that Greece was full of hard-working ants struggling to survive during those years of miraculous growth rates. Low-wage workers and pensioners were being told that they’d never had it so good; that their real wages and living standards were rising. Only they did not feel that way. And they were right.11 Whereas richer Greeks, who lived well off the back of German and French bank loans, prospered, poorer Greeks fell increasingly into a poverty trap. In the good times! And when the bad times came in 2010, they were told that they had been profligate grasshoppers who had”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“Both of us shook with rage at the sad fact that my signatures were guaranteeing more than 50 billion euros of private bank debt while our state could not rub together a few hundred million euros to pay for our public hospitals, our schools or Greece’s old-age pensioners.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“And so it was that politicians used to quibbling over a few million euros to be spent on pensioners, health or education gave their governments carte blanche to transfer hundreds of billions to bankers hitherto awash with liquidity. “Solidarity with bankers” helped Germany’s and France’s banks survive the collapse of their foolish derivative trades. However, another calamity beckoned: the remaining loans that bankers, like Franz, had granted to the deficit regions of the eurozone were sizeable enough to bankrupt those nations if stressed Irish, Spanish, Greek banks were to default. Before the ink of their own bailout agreements had dried, a second bank bailout was in progress: a bailout for the bankers of deficit countries whose governments could not afford to rescue them.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“Wall Street’s troubles instantaneously infected the City of London. Thus the Anglosphere went from financial supremacy to global basket case. Officials in Brussels, Paris, Frankfurt and Berlin rejoiced, confident that the “Anglos,” who had been lecturing them regarding the flimsiness of Europe’s monetary union and social market model, had got their comeuppance. Until, that is, they realized that Germany’s and France’s banks were in a state worse than Lehman’s, with their asset books weighed down with US-sourced derivatives that had lost 99 percent of their value.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“Thirdly, German bankers drooled over the large difference between the interest rate they could charge to German customers and the going interest rate in places like Greece. The chasm between the two was a direct repercussion of the trade imbalances. A large trade surplus means that cars and washing machines flow from the surplus to the deficit country, with cash flowing the opposite way. The surplus country becomes awash with “liquidity,” with cash accumulating in proportion to the net exports pouring into its trading partners. As the supply of cash increases within the surplus nation’s banks, in Frankfurt to be precise, it becomes more readily available and therefore cheaper to borrow. In other words, its price drops. And what is the price of money? The interest rate! Thus interest rates in Germany were remaining much lower than in Greece, Spain and their equivalents, where the outflow of cash (as the Greeks and the Spanish purchased more and more Volkswagens) maintained the price of euros in Europe’s south above its equivalent in Germany.3”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“First, the low level of private indebtedness left enormous room for a lot more lending. Back-of-the-envelope calculations made French and German bankers salivate at the room for lending in the Mediterranean, in Portugal and in Ireland. In contrast to British or Dutch clients who were mortgaged up to their ears, and were hardly in a position to borrow more, Greek and Spanish customers could quadruple their borrowing, given that they had so little debt to”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“This is because in places like Greece, Spain and southern Italy, private indebtedness was extremely low. People were of course poorer than Northern Europeans, lived in humbler homes, drove older cars and so on, but nevertheless they owned their homes outright, had no car loan and, generally, displayed the deep-seated aversion to debt that recent memories of poverty engender.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“What does waterboarding involve? You take a subject, lay him on his back and engulf his head with water so that he suffocates. Just before he dies, you stop, you allow the subject to take a few agonizing breaths, and then you start again. You repeat until he confesses.

Fiscal waterboarding is obviously not physical, it's fiscal. But the idea is the same, and it is exactly what happened to successive Greek governments from 2010 onwards. Instead of air, Greek governments nursing unsustainable debts were starved of liquidity. At the same time they were banned from defaulting to creditors. Facing payments they were being forced to make, they were denied liquidity till the very last moment, just before formal bankruptcy. Instead of confessions, they were forced to sign further loan agreements, which they knew would add new impetus to the crisis. The troika would provide just enough liquidity in order to repay its own members. Exactly like waterboarding, the liquidity provided was calculated to be just enough to keep the subject going without defaulting formally, but never more than that. And so the torture continued with the government kept completely under the troika's control.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“Greece's bailout, then Ireland's, then Portgual's, then Spain's were primarily rescue packages for French and German banks.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“only when the weak have decent reasons to defend the system that reproduces their subservience does the empire of the powerful”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“German officials knew it in 1964, as they knew it in 1992: for the French elites, a common currency with Germany was an attempt to neuter Germany, indeed to conquer the Bundesbank without firing a single shot. German decision makers, especially Bundesbank officials, would never allow themselves to forget that. But”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“A speech on March 18, 1947, by Herbert Hoover, President Roosevelt’s predecessor, flagged America’s new policy on Europe. “There is an illusion,” Hoover said, “that the New Germany . . . can be reduced to a pastoral state. It cannot be done unless we exterminate or remove 25 million people out of it.”33”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“Nevertheless, the idea that the bankrupt Europeans, who had already put the world through the wringer of two world wars in less than three decades, and still yearned for the reconstitution of their repulsive empires, would now control America’s surplus was anathema to an anti-imperialist, patriotic New Dealer like White.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?32 Ever”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe, Austerity and the Threat to Global Stability

“But unlike Nevada, Ireland had to fend for itself when it came to propping up its banks and paying its unemployment benefits. Lacking a printing press, it had to go cap in hand to the money markets to borrow huge quantities of money that, in Nevada’s case, had been paid for at the federal level.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future