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Jan. 13, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin

01:05:34

Greek Financial Crisis | Yanis Varoufakis | INTERNATIONAL | Rubin Report

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dave rubin

11:19

yanis varoufakis

52:17

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Speaker	Time	Text
unidentified		(upbeat music)
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I've said it before, but one of the most amazing things in the world today is how we are all
		truly connected instantly.
		It's a great way to connect with people If something happens in France or Egypt or Iceland, people across the globe hear about it as quickly as the people of France or Egypt or Iceland.
		As you guys know, I think there are real risks in our endlessly connected world.
		Just see my direct message from last week.
		But without question, our ability to break down geographic barriers, connect with people from other cultures, and share in ideas being formed across the globe is an incredibly impactful advancement for humanity.
		Of course this connectivity, this hearing about and seeing new people and fresh ideas, is only part of the puzzle.
		New people and fresh ideas only matter if you learn from them, for the better or for the worse.
		So when we see change, like in the Egyptian revolution in Tahrir Square in 2011, with people fighting against an oppressive regime, it only truly matters to us if it changes our behavior and our understanding of the world.
		If you just use a hashtag instead of understanding why the revolution happened, or why an arguably worse regime came in right after it, or why a regime just like the first one came in after that, then you really aren't doing anything other than adding to the noise.
		To really understand the world as it is, you have to understand not just what's going on today, but what has happened in the past as well.
		Just screaming about imperialism or terrorism doesn't change anything.
		Change takes intellectual rigor, not just outrage.
		The easiest thing you can do is use a hashtag, but it takes a lot more work to really understand an issue and get involved in a meaningful way.
		This week we're going to shift to a country which is absolutely in the thick of the global conversation right now, but at the same time is barely talked about.
		Greece is generally thought of as the world's first democracy, and currently finds itself at the center of the global financial crisis.
		After several European Union bailouts, the most recent one against the wishes of the people, Greece finds itself in a truly defining moment.
		Will it forever be beholden to the bankers in Germany and in Brussels, or will it figure out a way to reclaim its own financial independence?
		Of course, this financial mess in the very country democracy was born is set to the backdrop of the UK leaving the EU in the Brexit vote, as well as a massively shaken European Union trying to deal with the migrant crisis.
		Borders are blurred, finances are mixed, and nobody seems to know how to go forward.
		When you add that to the rising populism across the Western world, we live in a time when massive change is coming and the question is what form will that change take?
		Joining me to discuss all this is economist and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis.
		Yanis was instrumental in the fight against taking the last EU bailout of 2015 and resigned his post in the government when the government accepted the money.
		While his economics are a big mix of influences like leftist Karl Marx, he found himself shifting somewhat right, like not wanting to take the money during the lead up to the bailout, which shows why traditional labels, even in the realm of economics, are becoming increasingly meaningless.
		In a world where a tweet can cause a market to go up or down, our need to understand how connected we are is getting more and more important by the day.
		What happens in Greece no longer stays just in Greece.
		We're an interconnected world that at times seems to be growing faster than we can actually process.
		If the UK leaves the EU, and if Greece is held hostage by a bailout that it doesn't really want, what's the next domino to fall?
		And if the EU continues to change, how does that not only affect countries like France and Germany, but the United States and literally every other country on earth as well?
		Through this connectivity, many of us are finding intellectual allies in places we never thought that we would have.
		This is a beautiful thing if we can take the time to understand a bit more about history, economics, and philosophy.
		Education is truly our only buffer against the mistakes of the past.
		If history is doomed to repeat itself, let's at least try to make the repeats a little
unidentified		less painful.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		My guest this week is an economics professor who, according to his Twitter bio, was quietly
		writing obscure academic texts for years until he was thrust onto the public scene by Europe's
		inane handling of an inevitable crisis.
		Yanis Varoufakis, welcome to the Rubin Report.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		It's great to be here.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yanis Varoufakis.
		I mean, Greek people have by far the best names on earth.
		Is that fair to say?
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		Not in the slightest.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		You should have seen what kind of life I lived in Britain as a young person with a surname like mine.
unidentified		Did they butcher that constantly?
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		Oh yeah, you can imagine.
unidentified		You know, strategically as well.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I'm sure strategically.
		All right, so you are in Athens right now, and we are gonna do a lot on Greece.
		And I just mentioned to you before we started, I haven't done much on Greece, even though it's really right in the center of everything happening economically in the world and everything going on in the EU right now and everything else.
		So for the people that know nothing about Greece, can you explain why your Twitter bio says what it says?
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		Well, back in the late 1990s, a remarkable experiment in monetary economics took place in Europe.
		In our great infinite wisdom, we Europeans tried to bind monetarily together
		very disparate economies without any mechanism for recycling surpluses,
		for keeping checks and balances in the capital inflows and outflows.
		Any kind of economic union was skewed, sort of put on the back burner,
		while pushing forward a monetary union.
		Whenever you bind together different economies monetarily.
		We've seen this with the gold exchange standard in the mid-war period.
		We've seen it with various pegs between the United States dollar and various Central and Latin American currencies.
		We saw it in Europe in the 1980s and early 1990s with the European exchange rate mechanism.
		When you try to put together effectively to fix exchange rates without completing The political union, the fiscal union, the banking union.
		The banking union being the most important thing.
		You need to have a single banking sector throughout one currency area.
		So when you do that, what happens is, the first few months, years, resemble, this is an allegory that I use, it resembles invading Russia.
		Think of Napoleon.
		Think of Hitler.
		A wonderful beginning.
		You know, the troops storm across the steppes.
		Right.
		It all looks fantastic.
		It's working.
		And then, at some point, bitter winter takes hold.
		And it ends up very badly, with blood on the snow and so on and so forth.
		Ask Napoleon.
		So, exactly the same thing.
		What happens is this.
		In every economy, in every currency union, there are surplus areas, areas that produce surpluses, like California.
		And there are deficit areas, like Missouri.
		In Europe it's Germany and Greece.
		Within Germany, it's East Germany and Western Germany.
		There will always be surplus producers and deficit producers.
		And when that happens in a monetary union, there is a tendency for the surpluses to travel from the banks where they accumulate, ...to the deficit areas in the form of loans.
		Why?
		It's evident.
		Every time a Greek bought a Volkswagen or a BMW, a certain amount of money went to the Frankfurt banks, from the Greek banks, because, by definition, Germany always had, always will have, a trade surplus with a place like Greece.
		There is going to be excess capital accumulating in the Frankfurt banks.
		What do bankers do when they have excess capital at different levels of private debt?
		very low, the lowest in the world, at least in the developed world.
		Bankers look at even the poor Greek families that have their own home
		and they have no debt and they think, "These are fantastic customers."
		They're not indebted.
		They have collateral.
		We lend them.
		So a tsunami of capital goes from the surplus country to the deficit country.
		This because there is a reason why Greece is a deficit country.
		It's because we have far less of an industrialization success story happening.
		In other words, we have small Firms that cannot compete in tradables with the large conglomerates of Siemens and Volkswagen and AEG and so on.
		The money comes in and it effectively bids up asset prices, house prices, and various other non-producing, non-productive assets.
		That creates a semblance of growth.
		People really think that, oh my god, my house is now worth double what it was, so they get another loan and they get another credit card.
		And that means that they buy more Volkswagen, so the Germans are happy, the Greeks are happy.
		But this is the invading Russia part, when everything looks hunky-dory, when it really is nothing other than a Ponzi scheme.
		It is a debt-fuelled, pseudo-growth situation.
		And then eventually something happens, usually beginning with Wall Street.
		like it did in 2008, like before that happened in 1929.
		Whatever the reason is, there is a pin that pricks the bubble,
		the bubble bursts, and then what happens?
		What happens is exactly what happened in the 1930s.
		The greatest burden for justice falls on the weakest of shoulders,
		the Greek shoulders, the Portuguese shoulders, the Irish shoulders.
		And then suddenly, the surplus countries realize that they have effectively created a lot of assets
		in countries that are collapsing.
		But because you have a monetary union, and it's not just a fixed exchange rate, it's much harder than that because we don't have just a peg between a Greek currency and the German currency.
		We have the same damned currency.
	So you can't do what Argentina did.
	You cannot sever the peg and devalue.
	Because you don't have a currency to devalue.
	You have to create your own currency in order to devalue it.
	This is like foreshadowing a devaluation a year before it happens.
	You just need to state it to realize the extent of the costs involved and the collapse that that would bring.
	So, what happens is, the alternative is internal devaluation.
	So, the creditors come here, and this is the crime against logic that was committed in May of 2010.
	We had the Greek state bankrupt.
	There was no way it could roll over its debt.
	It did not have a currency that it could devalue, and it did not have a central bank.
	So, imagine 2008 in the United States.
	Imagine 2008 in the United States without the Fed.
	Right?
	And without the capacity to value the dollar even, vis-a-vis the yen, the euro and so on and so forth.
	It's just complete and utter madness.
	So what did they do?
unidentified		It's quite astonishing.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		They came to the Greek state and they said, OK, we'll bail you out.
		But of course it wasn't even a bailout.
		What they did was they gave to the Greek state the largest amount in humanity's history.
		In absolute terms.
		Remember, Greece is a little pipsqueak of a country.
		It's a tiny little place.
		2% of the European economy.
unidentified		2%.
unidentified		It's the Delaware of Europe.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		So imagine if the powers that be, the IMF, the Fed, the Treasury, the World Bank, were to descend upon Delaware and give the government of Delaware, of the state of Delaware, the largest sum in human history, on conditions of austerity that guarantee to shrink the income of the people living there.
		How old do you need to be to realize this cannot end well?
		Eight?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Nine?
		In America, it's a little older in America.
		We're not that bright.
		Let's say 14.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		I don't think so.
		Americans understand bankruptcy better than Europeans.
		They understand bankruptcy.
		You know what I think that most Americans understand?
		That you cannot escape a bankruptcy through loans.
		You can escape a crisis of liquidity through loans.
		But you cannot escape bankruptcy through loans.
		Especially when the loans are given.
		Imagine if Lehman Brothers, Mr. Fouts, went to Hank Paulson in 2008, as he did, and he were to say to him, you know, cup in hand, help me.
		And imagine if the answer was, I'm not going to bail you out.
		I'm not going to let you default.
		Go bankrupt.
		But I'm going to give you a 6% interest.
		6%.
		Think 6% interest rate in the middle of the collapse.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		When interest rates were crashing to zero.
unidentified		Right.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		I'll give you a loan by which you will make whole all your creditors
		and you will get this loan on condition that you will shrink your revenues.
		You know, I don't think a Hank Paulson would ever imagine of saying that.
		I know he hated Lehman Brothers, but even though he hated Lehman Brothers, he would never have... This is what happened with Greece.
		So the reason why Greece is in the news since 2010 is because of this.
		Of course, the reason why they did it.
		They were not idiots.
		They knew that this was not going to work.
		But it was an underhanded way of saving France's and Germany's banks,
		because they had stupidly lent a lot of money to the Greek government.
		They already had all the toxic derivatives that they had amassed from the other side of the Atlantic.
		They had already been bailed out by the French and the Greek and the German governments to the tune of 500 billion
		American dollars.
		The German banks only.
		A few months before Greece.
		And then suddenly another 200 or 300 billion would have to be given to them
		to compensate for the chain reaction that would happen if Greece defaulted.
		because then it will be Portugal, it will be Ireland and so on.
		So instead of doing the right thing, which is to say, okay, let the Greek state default and take the pain of bankruptcy, And we will recapitalize the banks and effectively nationalize them.
		Do a TARP to what happens next.
		Instead of doing that, they lied to 19 parliaments simultaneously.
		19 parliaments, the parliaments of the Eurozone.
		They said, out of solidarity, we have to help Greece overcome its problems.
		It was not a case of helping Greece overcome.
		It was a case of helping Deutsche Bank, Societe Generale, Finanzbank, overcome their problems without telling the German taxpayers that the Greek bailout was all about their own banks.
		So, but you see, once you commit this crime against logic, it's like Macbeth.
		You can't commit a crime, you have to commit a second crime, cover up the first.
		So that's the second bailout.
		Now, I was elected and appointed by the Prime Minister, Finance Minister, in order to stop this and to say to them, folks, no, no more.
		We're not going to get a third bailout from you, only to extend the crisis into the future, pretending that we have solved it.
		So that's more or less the story.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		So you've given me a lot to work with there.
		So let's back up a little bit and start at the beginning.
		So when all this was happening before The Federation came together before the EU was coming together, before all the currency was being mixed and all of that.
		Were there voices in Greece?
		Were you one of the voices that were saying, guys, this is not going to work?
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		There were a few voices, but we were drowned out by a cacophony of celebration at the prospect of monetary union.
		And the reason is that there was just too much at stake in terms of various kinds of profiteering that was being envisaged at the time.
		There were too many vested interests. And come to think of it, a monetary unification
		is extremely powerful as a weapon by various powerful forces.
		So if you think about in terms of German industry, you know, the industry of the exporting, the net exporters, they love the idea of a monetary union because they don't have to worry about constant devaluation, let's say of the Italian lira, which constantly resuscitates the competitiveness of Fiat cars, Italian cars.
		So the surplus countries have an interest in monetary union.
		But even in the deficit countries, which in the end always end up suffering.
		There is an interesting class distinction, social class distinction.
		So if you go to the northern suburbs of Athens, the leafy ones, the nice suburbs with the beautiful villas, a lot of tax evading has gone into building them.
		But nevertheless, you know, these are the rich Greeks.
		They hated the drachma.
		Because every time the drachma devoured, Their dollar value of their mansion or their yacht would diminish.
		So they wanted their own assets to be re-denominated in Deutschmarks.
		And let's face it, the Euro is a Deutschmark, right?
		But they managed, the whole system, the whole establishment, managed to even convince the working class.
		Even the labor unions.
		Think about it.
		You are a unionist.
		You spend a year organizing a strike.
		It's not an easy job to organize a strike.
		There's a lot of hardship.
		There's a lot of backlash.
		The workers go on strike.
		They lose income.
		They manage to get a 5% pay rise, let's say.
		and then two days later there's a devaluation, they lose it.
		So they were also convinced that a hard currency would be good for them.
		Now of course that means that it takes a certain illiteracy when it comes to macroeconomics
		to be convinced of that, but it's not difficult to see how somebody who sees their hard earned gains
		being depleted by devaluation vis-a-vis the Deutsche Mark to say "I want the Deutsche Mark.
		I want to be paid in Deutsche Mark like the Germans are.
		Why shouldn't I be there?"
		So when you have this coalition of different interests, I...
		I remember when I was writing articles, articulating my, and expressing my great misapprehension about the euro, I was being treated as an eccentric.
		And as somebody who had not caught up with the times, who had not understood that there is a new paradigm now of risk versus risk, which dissipated, you know the story.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		How much of that then is also tied into just the way politicians, not only in Greece, but all over the world, the way they operate, which is that they want sort of short-term gains.
		So in a way, you know, they're saying, oh, well, we want to help these rich people in Athens.
		They want to feel good about their money and all that and their property and all that stuff.
		And then we'll sort of put off what's going to happen long-term for somebody else to deal with.
		I'm guessing they didn't think, even if they knew what was going to happen, they didn't think it was going to happen so quickly, right?
		So it's also just sort of the way all of our politicians are designed to act.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		That's correct.
		But look, that has always been a problem with politics.
		Liberal democracies have always favored short-termism, always.
		But there is a huge sea change from the 1970s onwards, not just in Greece, in the United States, in Europe, everywhere.
		And that is because of financialization.
		With the end of Bretton Woods, after the early 1970s, and the unshackling of finance, the fact that suddenly finance became sexy and turbocharged through various instruments that were being developed to take advantage of the unshackling of finance after the end of Bretton Woods.
		What happened was the relative power of the financial sector grew inexorably vis-a-vis the political sphere.
		So the way I understand capitalism, there are three spheres of power.
		There is the political sphere, the economic sphere, the real economy sphere, companies making things, and there is finance.
		And the power balance between them constantly shifts.
		In the 1970s, there was a massive shift away from the political sphere to the financial sphere, to put it very bluntly.
		If you were President Eisenhower or JFK, you had a lot more power as a president than you did as President Carter or indeed George W. Bush.
		uh, the, you know, political goods diminished in value compared to
		financial goods. And that, look, it makes sense, doesn't it?
		Um, the best and the brightest were no longer drawn to the
		political sphere.
		Because if you really were, you know, 25 years old, you were up and
		coming, you were smart and so on. And you wanted to change things.
		It was much easier to change things, you know, by entering Goldman
		Sachs, or some other, or if you know, if you want to be in politics,
		you to go into the International Monetary Fund, then becoming a
		senator or a Greek member of parliament.
		So this is my response to your question, that by the time we created the euro, the And throughout the Western world, the quality of politicians had fallen, had subsided.
		And the result was that short-termism increased.
		Because we lack the leaders who can say, you know what?
		My target groups, focus groups, tell me that people want...
		But you know, I'm going to campaign for Y because I think Y is right.
unidentified		And I think that if I manage to convince people that Y is right, then I'm going to be a much more long-term successful politician.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		We didn't have these people anymore.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So it really is.
		It's almost like a marriage made in hell between the financial sector and the politicians, pretty much.
		So when the EU came back to you guys and offered really what was, if anything, I think you could describe it as ransom more than anything else.
		They were going to force Greece to take it, basically.
		But there was a referendum on it, right?
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		You're talking about 2015, when I was in government?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		Look, it's very, very simple.
		Before we were elected, our central bank had started a bank run against our banking sectors.
		Can you believe that?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it doesn't make sense.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		Central banks were created to stop bank runs.
		Right.
		Our central bank, which is the central bank of Europe, which is stationed in Frankfurt, They intentionally began a bank run in order to start putting pressure on a government that had not been elected yet, only because of the opinion polls.
		And why did they want to asphyxiate us before we were elected?
		Because people like me were saying that once we get elected, we'll go to them and say, folks, we need to reboot the whole program for Greece.
		That this is not working.
		We need three things.
		First, we need a substantial debt restructure.
		Because unless we have a substantial debt restructure, we are not going to be able to have sensible budget surplus targets.
		Because, you know, when I got into the ministry, I inherited the surplus target of 4.5% of GDP for the next 15 years.
		That has never happened in capitalist history.
		For a country to have 4.5% budget surplus, especially a broken economy like this.
		If you try to extract four and a half percent surplus from this economy, which is what's been happening now for five, six years, you destroy it.
		The only way to do it is by keep increasing, ratcheting up tax rates and having your tax take diminish.
		So here I am a left winger using Reaganite arguments in Africa.
		Yeah.
		How did that feel for you?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		How did that feel for you?
		Because I fully understand what you're saying there.
		you're now having to use logic that traditionally you wouldn't have used
		because they basically have a gun to the head of your country.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		Well look, when things get really bad, common sense binds people of the left and the right
		and vested interests divide.
		That was, you know, I...
		Even to this day... Let me tell you what happened to me three weeks ago.
		I was in... Where was I?
		I was in Frankfurt.
unidentified		I was in Frankfurt.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		I couldn't remember which German city, because I travel a lot in Germany.
		So, in the morning, I addressed 600 German bankers.
		In the afternoon, actually evening, I addressed 1,200 activists.
		Left-wing activists.
		Why am I telling you this?
		Because I gave the same speech.
		Exactly the same speech.
		But verbatim.
		It was an experiment.
		And I got a standing ovation both from the bankers and the left-wing activists.
		This is how, you know, where we are now here.
		Because the left-right divide is a very important one.
		But in a functioning capitalism, in a capitalism which has a degree of vitality about it.
		And then there's a question of the distribution of income between labor and capital, between those who argue that investment needs to be kept up through state intervention, free marketeers who argue that the best thing that the state can do is commit suicide.
unidentified		You know, we can have these arguments, but capital has to be functioning for us to have these arguments sensibly.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		When you are in a situation like we are in Greece today, or actually in Germany, Because this is a common crisis, a European crisis.
		There's no room for disagreement along the lines of left and right.
		Take my country here in Greece.
		I'm speaking to you from Athens.
		Well, there is no conflict of interest.
		There's no class conflict between capital and labor now, because you have entrepreneurs who are dying, whose companies are bankrupt, well and truly bankrupt.
		They have no access to banks.
		Banks do not operate as credit institutions.
		Demand is constantly diminishing.
		Tax rates are constantly going up, and they're hanging on for their life.
		And they do not want to fire workers, they do not want to reduce their workers' wages, but they can't make ends meet anyway.
		And you have this situation where you have trade unions and employers getting together and crying in each other's arms.
		So this is the moment when the left-right divide simply disappears.
		It's a question of common sense.
		So when you have a bankrupt state, bankrupt banks, bankrupt corporations, bankrupt pension funds, And bankrupt households.
		The only thing you can do is you can say, OK, folks, we must stop extending and pretending this bankruptcy through getting more loans on conditions that shrink aggregate demand further.
		So, you know, this is the situation we're facing now.
		And you mentioned the referendum.
		That was an amazing moment in world political history.
		Because think about it.
		Here I was, going to the Eurogroup.
		The Eurogroup is the finest minister's informal group that makes all the important decisions in Europe in a completely anti-democratic fashion.
		But nevertheless, it's where it all happens.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I want to get to that in a little bit.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		And I am presenting to them what... I'll tell you, Larry Summers, because he was one of the people helping me.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		I even went to bed with Larry Summers, for God's sake.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Not literally, I don't think, right?
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		Not literally.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Okay, just, you know, you could be misquoted very easily, you know?
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		No, but you know, I used anyone that could help me, that had some clout internationally.
		Larry Summers was excellent in that regard, because as I said, when common sense is common, there's no reason why we should not collaborate with anyone who can help, even with the prisons of darkness, as I call Larry Summers.
		So, you know, we had with Jeff Sachs, Larry Summers, Norman Lamont, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer in Britain, Finance Minister of Britain under the Conservatives.
		That was my team of helpers and aides and advisors.
		So I put to the Eurogroup a proposal, a fully-fledged proposal for recovering Greece, that when Larry Summers read it, he said, This is something a Wall Street bankruptcy lawyer would have put together.
		It was that left-wing.
		You know?
		Not at all, in other words.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		So I put this to them, okay?
		Think about it.
		I'm going to the IMF.
		Christine Lagarde is there.
		Paul Thompson from the IMF.
		People who are supposed to be neoliberals in the parlance of the left.
		And I'm saying to them, folks, we need to reduce corporate tax rates.
		It's ridiculous to have 29, 26, 27, 28% corporate tax rate in Greece, when in Bulgaria, which is only a short drive away, it's 10%.
		It is ridiculous to have a sales tax of 23% in a country where people can't afford to pay sales taxes.
		They can't afford to buy anything.
		So let's reduce those tax rates.
		Let's have a debt restructure.
		Let's retain the surplus in the government budget but reduce it so as not to choke the private sector.
		Let's have a development bank.
		Let's have a bad bank to deal with the NPLs, non-performing loans.
		These are very similar.
		And they would strike me down and they would demand increases in tax rates, further increases, which is what happened after I resigned.
		They demanded more extended pretend loans.
		This is the neoliberals from the IMF.
		Now it was clear that they had nothing to do with economics.
		It was all about power politics.
		It was about how to snuff out the government that they didn't like.
		It was a coup d'etat.
		That's what it was.
		So we took this to the Greek people.
		We said that, okay, Europe is proposing this Yeah.
		Basically to own you forever, pretty much.
		policies, which we consider to be catastrophic.
		Yeah.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		But, you know.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Basically, to own you forever, pretty much.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but I mean, owning a depleting asset.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		It was, it was, you know what my problem was during the negotiations?
		It was a unique problem, I think, in history.
		I was negotiating with creditors that did not want their money back.
		Because if you want your money back, you do what I said we should be doing, to allow the
		economy to grow to get your money back.
		But it's not that they didn't know what they were doing.
		They were happy to sacrifice Greece in order to win Spain.
		And in order to win France and Italy.
		Because this is a domino theory that they have.
		That if you give concessions to Greece, then the Spaniards will want it, then the French will want it.
		So there was never a serious discussion about an economic policy for helping Greece recover.
		They didn't want Greece to recover.
		So it's mind-boggling.
		You sacrifice a whole people in order to do what?
		To maintain an unsustainable monetary union with France.
		You see what will happen now in France in the next years.
		Just watch and see how the silliness that they did in Greece is going to bite them in France.
		But as Democrats I said, okay, right, I'm going to go to the Greek people and I'm going to put to the Greek people your proposal.
		And if the Greek people say yes, I will accept it because I'm a Democrat.
		I will hate it, but I also said I will resign personally and let somebody else who believes in it do it.
		Right.
		As we should in a democracy.
		And the European Union reacted to this, do you know how?
		By closing down our banks.
		They shut the banks down.
		It's like the Fed refusing liquidity to Citibank.
		Tomorrow morning, Citibank is finished.
		Gone.
		all the ATM systems to function.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right, so this was virtually in the United States.
		This was like our only moment where we even heard about this
		because suddenly for, you know, one day there were some videos
		of Greek people going to ATM machines and not getting out money.
		We didn't hear anything about any of the things that led up to it.
		That's what we heard about.
		Then we didn't hear about anything after that.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		So the only reason why they did that was to have a week before the referendum
		of effectively blackmailing the Greeks, saying to them, "Vote yes to the Eurogroup's measures, otherwise your banks
		will never open again."
		And why am I saying that this was a remarkable moment?
		We had every single television channel bombarding people with propaganda that they should vote yes to save the country.
		And that if they vote no, it will be Armageddon.
		They could not get access to their money.
		I was the finance minister that was responsible in the eyes of everyone for the fact that the banks had shut down, even though it wasn't my doing.
		It was the central banks against me.
		But nevertheless, it was on my watch that all the banks closed down.
		And I had approval ratings of 75% during that week.
		We would go out on the street and people would lift us on their shoulders.
		You know why?
		Because they say, we don't care about our money in the bank.
		It's a question of dignity.
		You can't say yes to this.
		It's a moment of truth.
		It's a moment of liberation.
		It's a moment of, you know, national sovereignty, after all.
		You cannot impose upon us this kind of coup d'etat and expect us to yield because we'll lose our money, stuff our money.
		And we got 62% of people voting no.
		Unfortunately, my prime minister on that night capitulated, and I resigned.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		All right, so 62% of the people say no to this bailout.
		The policies that you are trying to put forth, people are hearing, they're feeling good about everything you're doing.
		Then your prime minister, did he, wait, he stepped down or his party lost, right?
unidentified		No, no, no.
unidentified		No?
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		Do I have this back?
		Yeah, what happened was he overthrew his own government, more or less.
		Not literally, but metaphorically.
		What he did was to say to me in his office that night, a few hours, a couple of hours after the result came through, and I was celebrating with my wife out on the street and I walked into the prime ministerial residence and everybody was glum.
		Why are we glum?
		We won.
		And of course I knew because it was There was a process leading up to this and I had a lot more than just a premonition.
		I knew he was at the end of his tether and he was about to capitulate.
		But I had expected that the 62% David would have reviled him and he would have wanted to honour it.
		Instead, he was very much down in the dumps and he said to me, Yanis, it's time to surrender.
		He was expecting the guest to win, you see.
		It would have been a solution for him.
		He would have said, oh, on the basis of what the people are saying, I'm stopping the fight.
		And I said to him, look, I spent two to three hours trying to stiffen his lip, trying to bolster his psychology, and it was already decided with other people, members of the cabinets, that they would do an internal coup.
		They would turn the no into a yes.
		He asked me to stay on.
		I said to him, there's no way I'm going to sign that agreement, especially after we brought our people out onto the street and we energized them and made them give us a fantastic mandate.
		And I'm going to turn that mandate into its opposite by signing to this?
		No, no.
		I don't think that, you know, I'd much rather chop off my arm than do that.
		And at that point I decided I submit my resignation.
		The next morning he reshuffled the government and there was, it was just like a collective lobotomy.
		My comrades who up until that moment were saying we're not going, we're going to be steadfast, we're not going to succumb, they all said that sort of chanting a new mantra, the new mantra that they saved the country from bankruptcy, from bankruptcy.
		In other words, they meant from closed banks by accepting the last five years of extending and pretending.
		And this is what they are doing to this day.
		And you can watch them.
		It's like, it's a tragedy.
		It's an ancient Greek tragedy in the traditional ancient Greek sense of watching good people descend one after the other, the steps to hell.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so I guess when I said your Prime Minister lost, I guess that's what I meant.
		He won effectively, but he lost.
		And then, so for you, I think what the amazing through line is, is that one of the reasons that I wanted to have you on, and so many people had asked me to have you on, is because they wanted me to do more on left economics.
		But interestingly, for the half hour or so that we've been talking, really what you're saying is that in a situation like this, where reality has really crashed everything, that right economics are more effective.
		Has this changed the way you generally feel about economics, or do you think that this instance is so unique?
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		But remember, I am a very, I'm a confused economist on purpose.
		I believe that if you're not confused, you're not thinking, and I'm an eclectic economist.
		People concentrate on my Marxism, but I keep saying, and they don't take the first adjective seriously, but I'm a libertarian Marxist.
		So, my influences are just as much Hayek and von Mises as it is Marx and Keynes.
		Now, that sounds strange.
		How can you have influence from Hayek, Mises, Marx and Keynes?
		I think that it's the only way of understanding capitalism and being sensible about it.
		Each one of us, of those thinkers, has given us very important tools and concepts.
		So, Marx was the first economist to come up with the theory of the business cycle.
		of the boom and bust.
		There was no theory of boom and bust before that.
		Adam Smith didn't have it.
		David Ricardo had a theory of stagnation, but no theory of cycles.
		The idea, when we talk about disruptive technologies, that's Marx.
		If you read even the Communist Manifesto, it's the way that technology disrupts the social relations of production and creates a new mode of production.
		It went from feudalism through The steam engine destroyed feudalism and brought in capitalism.
		In my estimation, robotics, 3D printers, and so on, will bring the end of what we know as capitalism, bringing in some other mode of production.
		I don't know what we're going to call it.
		Hopefully it will be a good world to live in.
		But it will be something very different.
		There will be no purpose for corporations anymore, because economies of scale will have been devastated by technology.
		So that's what I learned from Marx.
		This is crucial for me, from Marx.
		Also the idea there is no such thing as a natural economic system.
		It's an evolving thing.
		That's from Marx.
		Schumpeter got it all from Marx anyway.
		If you read Schumpeter, who is a Dorian of the Right, he himself admits that even though his politics were right-wing, his economic theory would not have existed without Karl Marx.
		When it comes to Keynes, the idea of a coordination failure, where you have a pile of savings A pile of savings and a pile of debts.
		And the savings are not invested into productive activities that will generate the incomes that will extinguish the debts.
		This coordination failure is Keynes.
		And nobody else has explained it as well as Keynes.
		Hayek was fantastic.
		And von Mises.
		Two things.
		Firstly, explaining to us the true nature of the market.
		And the true utility of the market.
		The market is not just a little mechanism for pushing prices to the level of cost.
		It's a way of disseminating information, when information is very, very complicated to disseminate through some central process.
		The Austrian idea, the von Mises idea, that when you have a bankruptcy, you do not overcome the bankruptcy loans.
		And through taxpayer-funded Bailouts.
		This is one that I think is essential for all of us to understand.
unidentified		So these are my influences.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		And one of the great tragedies of the 20th century is that the libertarians and the Marxists ended up with followers that they did not deserve.
		So, for instance, you know the story about Marx.
		When he was old, just before he died, there were these young left-wing people, economists, who came to see him to pay their respect to the great man.
		And they were telling him that, you know, we are Marxists and that we believe X, Y, Z. And he was listening to them.
		He said, the only thing he said to them was, well, if you're a Marxist, I'm not.
unidentified		So, poor Marx did not deserve... Those are great dying words.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		He didn't deserve Stalin.
		He didn't deserve... In the same way Christ did not deserve the Spanish Inquisition, right?
		Marx did not deserve the Soviets.
		Similarly, the liberals and the libertarians do not deserve all those people who speak on their name.
		Margaret Thatcher, who usurped the notion of free markets and shrinking the state in order to build up the state and make it more centralized and more authoritarian than ever.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So basically these labels that we use, we need them in a certain way, right?
		Like you've mentioned a lot of labels here and it gives us a sort of framing of all this, but we're entering a time where none of it makes sense in a traditional way anymore.
		Is that fair to say?
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		The world is a very complicated place.
		So we need different, smart, sophisticated concepts in order to make sense of it.
		That was never easy.
		If you and I were sitting here, or not through Skype, but face-to-face, in the 1920s, late 1920s or after 1929, we would be having exactly the same amount of trouble understanding what was going on then than we do now.
		And again, we would have to borrow from the great ideas of great men, they were usually men back then, about the workings of capitalism.
		There's nothing new there.
		What I find interesting and at the same time satisfying is that during the worst of times, like the early 1930s or now, there is a possibility for you and I, even though we come from different political parts of the spectrum, or parts of the political spectrum, to sit down and find common ground.
		This is a silver lining of a very bad period.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, and that's very much what I've been trying to do with this show.
		So I think it's interesting.
		I think twice you mentioned that this is a type of coup d'etat.
		Do you really feel that Greece is under, that there's been a coup?
		I mean, I think when people think of a coup, we think of a military invasion usually.
		But do you feel that Greece has autonomy anymore, really?
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		No.
		The Greek government has less autonomy.
		than a small town in the Midwest.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		Less autonomy.
		The mayor of a small town in the Midwest, in your country, has more autonomy than the Greek Prime Minister does at the moment.
		And I've experienced that.
		Let me give you a few examples.
		The state has already Legally, through acts of Parliament, forced upon Parliament, at gunpoint.
		The gun was not a real gun, it was the banks.
		But, you know, I have an expression.
		When I was growing up, when I was around seven, there was a coup d'etat in Greece.
		A proper coup d'etat.
		One you would recognize a coup d'etat.
		There were tanks on the streets, the police broke down people's doors, abducted people, ended up in a football stadium or various prison camps and so on and so forth.
		So that was a coup d'etat using the tanks.
		The one I experienced was a coup d'etat using the banks.
		And you know, the latter is more subtle and therefore more sinister because I remember, I have vivid memories of living in a dictatorship with the military out there, manning various junctions in the city center, banning any concentration of people, including more than three people, burning books that they didn't like.
		It's just a fascist dictatorship, right?
		But there was hope, David, hope that is now missing.
		Do you know why?
		Because you could identify the authoritarianism.
		All you had to do was to step out and look at the army.
		You could look at the secret policeman hiding behind his newspaper, watching over your house.
		You knew what the enemy was.
		And you thought, OK, well, all we have to do is we have to overpower them.
		And we'll be free.
		Now it's more difficult to see where liberation will come from.
		Because you come out on the street, you don't see anything.
		But there is fear.
		As we speak, my successor in the Ministry of Finance, who was my friend for many years and an academic colleague, I can assure you that there's not one piece of legislation that you can push through Parliament without the approval If not without the dictation of that piece of legislation by a certain fellow called Thomas Wieser, who is sitting in Brussels.
		He's an Austrian, nobody has heard of him, but he's effectively the governor of Greece.
		Every single piece of legislation has to go through Thomas Wieser.
		Let me talk about, just for a second, about the institutionalization of the transfer of sovereignty, of freedom.
		When I moved into the ministry, The tax department was part of the ministry.
		Has always been part of the ministry.
		Unlike in the United States where the IRS is separate from the Treasury, and it's answerable to Congress, the tax department was part of my ministry.
		So I was responsible for it.
		If there was any scandal, including our IRS, I would have to appear in Parliament and be answerable for it.
		But I had no control over it, no information of what they did.
		The head of the Greek IRS was appointed by the creditors, And was only dismissible by the creditors.
		So, as you Americans say, no taxation without representation.
		I had representation and responsibility without any control.
		Now, the same thing happens with our banks.
		The banks have all been bailed out by the Greek taxpayers, with money that the Greek taxpayers borrowed or were forced to borrow from the Germans, the Slovaks, the Italians.
		So, the Greek state retains a majority holding of all the Greek banks.
		And yet the Greek government has absolutely no say in the running of the banks.
		Do you know why?
		Because the troika, the creditors, Pass the money on from the European taxpayers to the Greek taxpayers to bail out the banks on condition that the shares would be non-voting, that the shares that the Greek state would take in exchange would not have a vote and would be deposited with the so-called HFSF, the Hellenic Greek Financial Stability Facility, some institution that was created, purpose made for this, whose personnel would be appointed by the creditors.
		We paid for the shares of the banks, they have no votes, and we don't even hold them.
		Same applies to all Greek public assets.
		Can you hear that?
		Imagine your nation's assets, public assets.
		The roads, the beaches, the mountains, the national parks, your heritage.
		Imagine if that was all put into a special vehicle, So I suspect I know the answer to this, but I assume that when Brexit happened, you must have been cheering through the roof, right?
		Because that's probably the first underpinning of some escape here?
		Nope.
		So it's a state under occupation.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So I suspect I know the answer to this, but I assume that when Brexit happened,
		you must have been cheering through the roof, right?
		Because that's probably the first underpinning of some escape here?
unidentified		Nope. - Really?
unidentified		No.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		You see, I'm a contradictory kind of guy.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Oh man, now you're going to quote somebody else.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		I actually campaigned in Britain against Brexit.
		And it dumbfounded a number of people.
		People said to me, you know, the European Union asphyxiated you.
		They treated you with contempt.
		They drove you out of government.
		And you're asking us to stay in the European Union?
		And my answer was yes.
		And the reason was twofold.
unidentified		Firstly, you can't get out.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		By voting to get out, you're not going to get out.
		Look at what's happening now.
		They're going to be embroiled in a 10-year period of negotiations.
		Instead of becoming extroverted and looking to the rest of the world for Britain to become, again, Britannia that rules the waves and is a trading nation, they're going to spend the next 10 years completely concentrated, focused on negotiations that get them nowhere with Brussels.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So basically just the process of extricating themselves out.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		And I use the last line in Hotel California.
		You can check out anytime you like.
		So, given that that is the case, and you don't want to leave and completely sever your links with the European Union, because you're part of Europe.
		60% of your trade is with Europe.
		Okay?
		So you can't just say, okay, I'll forget about it.
		You're going to have an economic implosion in Britain that's going to affect the most underprivileged people and the ones who want Brexit.
		So just be fearful of that which you pray for, I was saying to them.
		And my line was, the European Union is a terrible thing.
		There's no doubt about that.
		Nobody knows this better than me.
		But what I think we should do, we should forget leaving.
		We should bind forces together within this awful union and fight against the powers that be within Europe.
		But pull our forces together within Europe.
		So for instance, let's say in the United States, you're against the federal government.
		The solution is not to upstamps and declare that California is going to be an independent republic.
		What we should be doing as patriots, as sensible Americans, is bind together across the United States to change the federal government.
		And even its institutions.
		Change the constitution if you want.
		But the solution is not fragmentation.
		Fragmentation, you see... Let me put it this way, and I'll conclude with this.
		If we had not created this European Union, I would fight tooth and nail against its creation.
		Tooth and nail against its creation.
		Like I fought against the creation of the Eurozone.
		But it's one thing to say we should not have created it.
		It's quite another to say let's now break it up.
		Because if you break it up, you don't go back to where you would have been if you didn't create it.
		You fall off a cliff.
		Because imagine if the European Union now breaks up.
		What's going to happen?
		There's going to be a fault line across the River Rhine, splitting France and Germany again.
		There's going to be a stagflationary Latin Europe, Italy, France, with inflation and high unemployment because those currencies are going to devalue massively.
		So there's going to be inflation and there will be unemployment.
		So stagflation.
		Not very nice.
		Whereas in Germany you're going to have deflation.
		You're going to have millions of workers who are now working poor becoming unemployed poor.
		I mean, this is fascinating.
		So I guess I would describe you at this point as a libertarian.
		I was against Brexit because you need to see ahead.
		And the solution for me must be pan-European now.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I mean, this is fascinating.
		So I guess I would describe you at this point as a liberal, did you say Marxist libertarian
		or libertarian Marxist?
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		Either way.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Either way?
		But you gotta add realist into that, right?
		But I guess that frames it, because basically what you're saying is there's a sucky situation here, but that doesn't mean that leaving is the answer.
		So we're dealing with a lot of macro stuff here.
		On the micro level, for the average person that's in Athens right now, for somebody that lives a block away from you, let's say they had a little bit of money and they wanted to open a store.
		Could they literally not get Yes.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		Banks are... David, let me give you just one number so that you understand why I'm saying this.
		55%.
		This is the percentage of all loans given out by Greek banks which are non-performing as we speak.
		Can you imagine a bank whose loan book is in the red by 55% of the loan book being non-performing?
		They're insolvent.
		So they know they're insolvent.
		So any dime they get, they hold on to, because they know that the central bank, the authorities, can declare them insolvent at any moment.
		The fact that they are not doing it is because the authorities fear that if they do it, then there will be a complete collapse of all the banking systems around Europe, because they're all in deep trouble.
		Think of Italian banks, Spanish banks, German banks, Deutsche Bank, for God's sake, you know, French banks.
		But nevertheless, if you're a banker, In Greece, let's say you own Alpha Bank or Euro Bank, these are Greek banks, and some money comes in, you hold on to it.
		You do not let it out, because you want to shore up your capitalization.
		And the result is that I have a friend who has a factory, small factory, it used to be bigger, now it's smaller, up in central Greece.
		And this is a very good case in point, because he has a very good track record.
		His company has been profitable, even in the middle of the crisis, over the last decade.
		And the reason is because 95% of what he produces he exports.
		It's plastics mainly.
		So 95% of output goes outside of Greece.
		So that's why he's been shielded from the crisis.
		So recently I was talking to him and he said to me that if he manages to survive it in July 2017, it will be a great feat.
		I said, why?
		You're profitable.
		He said, yeah, I'm profitable.
		But you know what?
		My suppliers, he gets his raw materials from abroad, no longer accept Greek bank letters of credit.
		So he has to pay for his supplies from his own pocket.
		And that is crippling for any business.
		So he has unfulfilled orders because he's constrained in terms of his inputs.
		Because the banking system does not work.
		So I pushed him a bit further and said, so why don't you go to a German bank?
		Ask them for money.
		I mean, they must be dying to give you money because you have a good business and they don't have enough customers.
		So, it's a match made in heaven.
		I said, oh, you think I haven't done it?
		I went to Frankfurt.
		You know what they said to me?
		Bring your headquarters to Germany and we'll give you loans.
		That's not how to run a monetary union, right?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right, that's how you basically rape and pillage everybody and centralize everything.
		Do you think that there's a sort of net gain here of what this has done for the Greek people just in terms of National pride.
		Now, I know national pride can always go awry, but I was even watching the Anthony Bourdain show on CNN a couple days ago, and they did a whole thing about Greece.
		It was mostly about food, but they talked a little bit about the economic situation, and I heard a bunch of people say that there's a sort of newfound sense of pride because they do feel like their backs are against the wall now.
		Do you sense that?
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		Well, we, you know, when we were in government, and I'm not saying this Because I was part of it.
		I think this is quite objective.
		That no that we said to Germany, to the creditors for a few months, that resistance caused a sense of pride to skyrocket.
		And then of course it was dashed the night of the referendum that we discussed.
		But to this day you're right.
		Greeks have a capacity to do two things.
		To extract pride out of survival.
		To say that, look, we're still alive.
		You have not managed to force us to migrate yet.
		And also to extract a lot of joy out of misery.
		We are very good at that in Greece.
		Because we've had centuries of poverty.
		Centuries of occupation.
		Remember, this was under the Ottomans, the Turks, for a good 500 years.
		And we survived.
		So we're very hard to kill.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		That's the key to the whole thing here.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, very hard to kill, and especially the killer spirits.
		You go out now, it's a Tuesday night, if you go out now to the center of Athens, you'll find people dancing and singing, and of course the songs can be melancholy, they can be very bitter, they can be very sardonic and ironical, but there's a revival of the arts, Which is a good thing.
		I think the 1930s was very good for music and the arts and cinema and theatre because generally the human spirit and the human condition has a remarkable capacity to respond to hardship with creativity.
		So we see that.
		So there are silver linings.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I'm curious, do you know of a Greek mythology that's sort of the right metaphor for all this?
		I loved Greek mythology when I was a kid and this morning I kept trying to come up with something that would feel like the right answer.
		Is there a story in Greek mythology that gets us close to what's going on right now?
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		Plenty.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Give me one.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		Well, the bailouts at Sisyphus.
		Sisyphus is pushing the rock up the hill and he's condemned.
		This is his punishment.
		The moment he reaches the top, the rocker rolls back and he has to do it again.
		And the optimal strategy for Sisyphus is to stop pushing it up the hill.
		This was my view about the bailouts.
		The optimal strategy was to stop doing it.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
unidentified		All right.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		That one's pretty on point.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Now I want a couple more.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		A second one is the Ulysses strategy, which I really enjoy.
		It was what I was trying to convince my fellow ministers and cabinet that we should be doing.
		You recall the story when Ulysses, Odysseus, his Greek name, is on his ship and he's trying to sail back to Ithaca, to his hometown, to his home island.
		And this is a story of multiple challenges that he faces on his way back home.
		One of the challenges is that this island inhabited by famous singing women called the Sirens.
		The Sirens were infamous for their wonderful singing, their melodic singing, the most beautiful voices in the world, but also for their cruelty because they used their singing to lure sailors to the island and then they slaughtered them and ate them.
		So he wanted to combine, to have his pie and eat it.
		He wanted to listen to their song and not die.
		So his strategy was, He asked his crew members to plug their ears with wax so they wouldn't hear the song, to tie him up on the mast and sail past the island so he would hear the song, but not to listen to him at all, not pay any attention to him, to his gesticulations and his protestations, let me out, let me out, until they were clear of the island.
		So I was saying to my colleagues, Forget the silent song.
		If you want to listen to it, we have to tie ourselves up on an imaginary mast, which must be a commitment not to take another penny from Europe until our debt is restructured and to have a sensible fiscal policy.
		Because if we take any money, this is like succumbing to the silent song.
		And finally, I'll give you three.
		Three is a good number.
		The story of Antigone.
		Antigone was a young princess in Thebes.
		She was a tragic figure.
		Her two brothers were involved in a civil war.
		They were fighting amongst each other as to who would become king.
		And the result is that they both died on the battlefield.
		The sitting king of Thebes, who was Antigone's uncle, decided that one of them was in the wrong, one of the two brothers, the one who had attacked the city in order to claim the throne from his brother, and therefore, whereas his brother would be given full military honours and a wonderful funeral, the body would be let Left to rot and to be eaten by jackals on the battlefield.
		An Antigone who thought, who believed deeply and religiously that it doesn't matter at all what you think about a man's deeds.
		Everyone deserves a proper funeral.
		She defied her uncle, the king, and buried her brother.
		The result being that she was executed.
		And there's a wonderful speech in Antigone, The Tragedy, in which she explains beautifully that when right contradicts power, right should prevail.
unidentified		So, three stories.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		That's a perfect way to end this.
		I hope that next time we can do this in person because, as I told you before, I'm overdue to visit Greece.
		Where's the best Spanakopita in Athens?
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		Oh my goodness.
		You'll find a lot of good Spanakopita.
		You don't need to go to one place.
		But there's one place around the corner from where I live.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		All right, fair enough.
		You don't have to actually say that while we're on air.
		All right, well, it was a pleasure talking to you and, you know, it's a mess, but good luck, I guess.
yanis varoufakis ▲ ● ▼		You know, it is a mess, David, but at the same time, it's a mess that we all find ourselves in.
		The only reason why Greece matters is because it's indicative of what is wrong with our world at large.
		Greece should not matter to people in America and matters to people in Greece.
		But it is interesting that the denial of the establishment to deal with what it is, in the end, a simple-to-solve problem of financial engineering and some fiscal policy, their denial to do it is a political failure, which I think reflects the reasons why all our countries, the United States and Europe, the whole world, is in trouble, because we have a scandalous political failure.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
		Well, it just combines so many things that I'm talking about all the time.
		And it's been a pleasure talking to you.
		And for more on Yanis's work, you can go to his website, which has a ton of his articles.
		It's a great site.
		It's yanisvaroufakis.eu.
		And we'll have the link right down below.

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