Just to give you an
update: Greece still can't pay back its debts; the EU, still led by Germany,
still wants to wring Greece for every euro it can, imposing punishing austerity
and tax increases; this regimen is still pushing Greece to the brink; if Greece
leaves the euro, the currency might collapse, throwing the world into economic
turmoil.
So, yes, one reason
why he's the most interesting man in the world is because he's a key player in
a drama where the world's economic fate potentially hangs in balance.
But Varoufakis is also
interesting because he's not a politician. He's not even an activist. He's just
an economics professor. Worse: He's a blogger.
Varoufakis was an
economics professor at the University of Athens, until his acid and intelligent
commentary on the Greek crisis gave him global notoriety (at least among people
who follow economic writing). As his Twitter bio (still unchanged since being
named minister) puts it, he was "quietly writing obscure academic texts
for years, until thrust onto the public scene by Europe's inane handling of an
inevitable crisis." (And, let's face it, writing brilliant posts until one
is plucked into a key decision-making job is every blogger's dream. Cough.)
Even after being named
finance minister, Varoufakis still doesn't mind picking fights on the internet
and lambasting journalists as idiots — not typical finance minister behavior
(at least in public).
Varoufakis is also
interesting because, unlike virtually every other finance minister on the
planet, and certainly in the EU, he actually has an economics degree, and he
actually understands the mechanics and the details of Greece's public debt and
macroeconomic issues inside out.
His academic specialty
is game theory, the economic theory of how people make decisions, particularly applied
to negotiations. Everyone watching Varoufakis assumes that he has some secret
master plan to negotiate the Germans into knots.
Plus, he looks more
like an action hero than an economics professor or a politician. Smart,
good-looking, unusual, pugnacious, voluble, with an ace up his sleeve, and at
the center of one of the most important dramas in the planet right now. Eat
your heart out, Dos Equis guy.
But the most
interesting aspect of this most interesting man is that he shows how finance
and monetary issues can blur political distinctions. Varoufakis is a
self-proclaimed "Marxist" who represents a far-left party, but at the
same time, his analysis of the crisis would probably be supported by my idol
Milton Friedman.
The Greek crisis is
often cast in terms of profligate, lazy Greeks who took on more debt than they
could handle and then went begging to the industrious Germans for a handout.
The reality is almost the complete opposite: The euro, precisely because it was
geared toward Germany's economic interests, created a massive credit bubble in
Europe's southern economies, and the ensuing austerity imposed by Germany on
Greece was absolute madness, destroying its economy without giving the country
the possibility to repay, something Milton Friedman wouldn't have liked at all.
The responsibility for the crisis lies on Germany's shoulders. Friedman would
have understood, as Varoufakis does, that the ECB's monetary tight-fistedness
is what is keeping Europe in economic stagnation, and increasing its public
debt, not a lack of austerity.
Varoufakis shows that
in many areas of policy, extremists from both sides usually have more in common
than an out-of-touch elite trapped in failed paradigms.
(Πηγή: theweek.com)
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