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    And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future
    Unavailable
    And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future
    Unavailable
    And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future
    Audiobook10 hours

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

    Published by Hachette Audio

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    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    A #1 Sunday Times bestseller [UK]

    A titanic battle is being waged for Europe's integrity and soul, with the forces of reason and humanism losing out to growing irrationality, authoritarianism, and malice, promoting inequality and austerity. The whole world has a stake in a victory for rationality, liberty, democracy, and humanism.

    In January 2015, Yanis Varoufakis, an economics professor teaching in Austin, Texas, was elected to the Greek parliament with more votes than any other member of parliament. He was appointed finance minister and, in the whirlwind five months that followed, everything he had warned about-the perils of the euro's faulty design, the European Union's shortsighted austerity policies, financialized crony capitalism, American complicity and rising authoritarianism-was confirmed as the "troika" (the European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund, and European Commission) stonewalled his efforts to resolve Greece's economic crisis.
    Here, Varoufakis delivers a fresh look at the history of Europe's crisis and America's central role in it. He presents the ultimate case against austerity, proposing concrete policies for Europe that are necessary to address its crisis and avert contagion to America, China, and the rest of the world. With passionate, informative, and at times humorous prose, he warns that the implosion of an admittedly crisis-ridden and deeply irrational European monetary union should, and can, be avoided at all cost.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHachette Audio
    Release dateSep 19, 2017
    ISBN9781478917878
    Unavailable
    And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

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    Reviews for And the Weak Suffer What They Must?

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    • 5/5
      Been a hard read, this one, but taught me a lot. Lots I don't understand but I shall read more and hopefully understand more. So angry......
    • 4/5
      Varoufakis was Greek's finance minister during the hight of their recent crisis in 2015. He is also a left-leaning (a self-identified "erratic Marxist"). This book was published in 2016.The book is about the history of the Euro, from the Bretton Woods agreement, up until today. Although Greece and Europe are the center of the story, the United States plays a very strong supporting role.Back in the ‘40s, with a shift away from the gold standard, Keynes, a Brit, came to Bretton Woods to propose his elegant “bancor” protocol as an international reserve currency. The United States didn’t like this idea, even though it was superior to their own proposal: having the dollar serve in this capacity.This was just fine when we were a surplus nation, but as that ceased to be the case, how could we continue to stay the international reserve currency? International economic relations are simplest when trade is balanced. This is because imbalances leave wealth in the hands of countries that don’t need it. If they loan this money out with interest to poor countries (the best “investment” opportunity), as the intelligence of economics would have one do, that just exacerbates the imbalance, until, eventually, the weak economy collapses at the expense of the strong.The alternative to this is to have an surplus rebalancing mechanism that essentially gifts funds to the weakest aspects of a union (such as in the United States). The Euro failed to do this.Going back again, 70% of Germany’s WWII debt forgiven, and the US decided to prioritize investment there for the development of their manufacturing economy. There is some irony in this, as they were the biggest losers of WWII. Regardless of the merits of this path (which was a much better route than the one taken post WWI), this meant that Germany became the strongest economy in Europe, seconded by France.In the ‘60s, France and Germany started exploring the possibility of a joint currency. These conversations would extend intermittently for decades before the Euro was actually created during the fall of the Berlin Wall. By this point, the eurozone grew to encompass many more countries than France and Germany, although they were at the heart.One big topic topic of exploration in the book is about democracy, or lack thereof in the Eurozone. Just as many have been criticizing blockchain projects like BitCoin and Ethereum for lacking an adequate representative governance mechanism, the Euro is in the same position, and that’s one of the reasons for its failure.Another big topic is that of debt forgiveness. Varoufakis reminds us that capitalism is solely possible due to limited liability and bankruptcy.The dynamics explored in this text accurately predicted both Brexit and the rise of Trump. Nazi nationalism is the most likely outcome of a failure to create adequate equality and democracy.
    • 4/5
      Critiques the European single currency and the political decisions that lead to its creation. Explains the difficulties generated by a financial crisis that requires political rather than bureaucratic solutions.
    • 3/5
      How to have your cake and eat it too, rent it out, sell it, take loan against it, ask for seconds, complain about the quality of the cake and tell the pastry chef he's fat.

      This is a passionate and wholly one sided rant, full of cheap shots and bizarre autobiographical snippets. It's still a worthwhile read (maybe because of that) though I wish it offered some candour and insight into the Greek part of the collapse as well.
    • 5/5
      A trenchant critique of the forces that led to the creation of the European Union, the debacle of the Euro and the impact of the resulting economic crisis on Greece and other unfortunate recipients of the German Bank's largesse.