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Book Details
Abstract
'The emerging rock-star of Europe's anti-austerity uprising.'
Daily Telegraph
'A spirited book.' New Yorker
In this remarkable and provocative book, Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece, explodes the myth that financialisation, ineffectual regulation of banks, greed and globalisation were the root causes of both the Eurozone crisis and the global economic crisis. Rather, they are symptoms of a much deeper malaise which can be traced all the way back to the Great Crash of 1929, then on through to the 1970s: the time when a Global Minotaur was born.
Today's deepening crisis in Europe is just one of the inevitable symptoms of the weakening Minotaur; of a global system which is now as unsustainable as it is imbalanced. Going beyond this, Varoufakis reveals how we might reintroduce a modicum of reason into what has become a perniciously irrational economic order.
An essential account of the socio-economic events and hidden histories that have shaped the world as we now know it.
Yanis Varoufakis is the former finance minister of Greece. He was for many years a professor of economics in Britain, Australia and the USA before he entered government. He is currently Professor of Economics at the University of Athens. Since resigning from Greece's finance ministry he has co-founded an international grassroots movement, DiEM25, which campaigns for the revival of democracy in Europe. He is the author of Adults in the Room and the Sunday Times Number 1 bestseller And the Week Suffer What They Must?
'The emerging rock-star of Europe's anti-austerity uprising'
Daily Telegraph
'His argument has an ambitious sweep.'
The Times
'This trenchant and readable critique sets the eurozone crisis within a much longer context.'
London Evening Standard
'A spirited book.'
New Yorker
'The book is one of those exceedingly rare publications of which one can say they are urgent, timely and absolutely necessary.'
Terry Eagleton
'Yanis Varoufakis is a rare economist: skilled at explaining ideas, happy to join in public debates and able to put his discipline in a broader context.'
Aditya Chakrabortty, Guardian lead economics writer
'Yanis is one of the best, brightest and most innovative economists on the planet.'
Steve Keen, author of Debunking Economics
'Clearly and strongly written, with logical organization building towards simple conclusions, the book is an easy yet rewarding read ... perhaps should become the standard way we think about the nature of our increasingly dysfunctional world economy.'
Joel Campbell, International Affairs
'In the most comprehensive guide to the contemporary economic crisis yet written, Yanis Varoufakis traces out the path from post-war US economic supremacy to the current predicament.'
Gary Dymski, University of California, Riverside
'If you want to know how serious the current crisis is, you should read this book. With much eloquence, Yanis Varoufakis argues that the current financial problems are connected to the emerging fault lines of the international monetary system.'
Shaun Hargreaves-Heap, University of East Anglia
'An
all-encompassing account of Western postwar history, seen through the lens of
one overriding problem: how to resolve the imbalances in financial flows
between nations.'
The European Legacy
Table of Contents
Section Title | Page | Action | Price |
---|---|---|---|
Front Cover | Front cover | ||
About the Author | ii | ||
Title Page | iii | ||
Copyright | iv | ||
Contents | v | ||
Abbreviations | vii | ||
Foreword | ix | ||
Preface | xiii | ||
Acknowledgements | xviii | ||
1: Introduction | 1 | ||
The 2008 Moment | 1 | ||
Six Explanations for Why It Happened | 4 | ||
The Parallax Challenge | 20 | ||
The Global Minotaur: A First Glimpse | 22 | ||
2: Laboratories of the Future | 26 | ||
Our Two Great Leaps Forward | 26 | ||
Condorcet’s Secret in the Age of Capital | 29 | ||
The Paradox of Success and Redemptive Crises | 33 | ||
Raising the Stakes: Crashes, Crises and the Role of Finance | 35 | ||
The Crash of 1929 | 38 | ||
Midas Loses His Touch: The Collapse of the Gold Standard | 43 | ||
The Two Gremlins: The Labour and Money Markets | 45 | ||
The Ghost in the Machine | 50 | ||
Epilogue: Incubation of the Global Plan | 54 | ||
3: The Global Plan | 57 | ||
The Remarkable Opportunity | 57 | ||
Bretton Woods | 58 | ||
The Lost Opportunity | 61 | ||
The Rise of the Fallen | 67 | ||
The Marshall Plan to Dollarize Europe and Rehabilitate Germany | 71 | ||
The European Union and the Japanese Miracle | 75 | ||
The Global Plan’s Geopolitical Ideology | 79 | ||
American Domestic Policies During the Global Plan | 82 | ||
Conclusion: Capitalism’s Golden Age | 85 | ||
4: The Global Minotaur | 90 | ||
The Global Plan’s Achilles Heel | 90 | ||
The Global Plan Unravels | 91 | ||
Interregnum: The 1970s Oil Crises, Stagflation and the Rise of Interest Rates | 94 | ||
The Global Minotaur | 100 | ||
The Minotaur’s Four Charismas | 101 | ||
A Most Peculiar Global Surplus Recycling Mechanism | 109 | ||
Conclusion: The Global Minotaur’s Glittering Triumph | 110 | ||
5: The Beast’s Handmaidens | 113 | ||
Minotaur Envy | 113 | ||
Takeover Fever: Wall Street Creates Metaphysical Values | 115 | ||
Hedging and Leverage | 120 | ||
An Ideology of Cheapness for the Age of Excess: The Walmart Effect | 123 | ||
Tainted Houses, Toxic Cash: Wall Street Generates Its Own Private Money | 127 | ||
Toxic Theory, Part A: Trickle-Down Politics, Supply-Side Economics | 133 | ||
Toxic Theory, Part B: Economic Models and Assorted Delusions | 139 | ||
Epilogue: The Writing on the Wall | 142 | ||
6: Crash | 146 | ||
Tumbling Piles | 146 | ||
Chronicle of a Crash Foretold: Credit Crunch, Bailouts and the Socialization of Nearly Everything | 147 | ||
The Low-Down | 160 | ||
Epilogue: The Slide into ‘Bankruptocracy’ | 164 | ||
7: The Handmaidens Strike Back | 169 | ||
With a Little Help from My Friends: The Geithner–Summers Plan | 169 | ||
Europe’s Version of the Geithner–Summers Plan | 174 | ||
Biting the Hand that Saved Them: The Ugliest Handmaiden at Its Boldest | 178 | ||
The Return of Predatory Governance, Vacuous Economics and the Curious Tragedy of Market Fundamentalism | 181 | ||
Epilogue: The Worst of Both Worlds | 183 | ||
8: The Minotaur’s Global Legacy: The Dimming Sun, the Wounded Tigers, a Flighty Europa and an Anxious Dragon | 185 | ||
The Dimming Sun: Japan’s Lost Decades | 185 | ||
Wounded Tigers: Japan, America and the South East Asian Crisis | 191 | ||
Germany’s Europe | 195 | ||
The Deutschmark’s New Clothes | 198 | ||
German Reunification and Its Global Significance | 201 | ||
First as History, then as Farce: Europe’s Bank Bail-Outs | 203 | ||
Greeks Bearing Debts | 206 | ||
Tumbling Mountaineers and the Euro Crisis | 208 | ||
Why Is Europe Dithering When the Crisis Could Be Resolved Simply and Quickly? | 209 | ||
The Dragon Soars, Then Plunges into Angst | 212 | ||
Epilogue: Between the West’s Bankruptocracy and the East’s Fragile Strength | 219 | ||
9: A World Without the Minotaur | 221 | ||
The Global Minotaur Hypothesis: A Summary | 222 | ||
The Minotaur Is Dead! Long Live America's Deficits! | 224 | ||
The Minotaur's Death in Pictures | 227 | ||
America After the Minotaur | 229 | ||
Quantitative Easing as the Most Complex Form of Wishful Thinking | 232 | ||
Europe After the Minotaur | 236 | ||
China After the Minotaur | 244 | ||
Postscript | 247 | ||
History's Actors | 247 | ||
Self-Restraint and the Dangers of Success | 249 | ||
Can the Minotaur Survive? | 250 | ||
A World Economy Stunned | 251 | ||
The Missing Mechanism | 252 | ||
And Now What? In Search of History's Next Actors | 253 | ||
Notes | 257 | ||
Recommended Reading | 267 | ||
Select Bibliography | 269 | ||
Index | 272 | ||
Back Cover | Back cover |