Here is a nice video of Greece’s new Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis being interviewed in Italy late last year before Syriza came to power. He talks about his ideas for resolving the Eurozone crises (plural) within the confines of the current rules of the EU. These, he first set out in a paper entitled “A Modest Proposal for Resolving the Eurozone Crisis” (since updated). Notice how scathing he is of the President of the European Commission in particular. In his new role, he needs to be a little more diplomatic perhaps, but it will be interesting to see how he deals with the leaders of the Eurozone as they try to prevent Syriza from pursuing the policies it has a mandate to deliver.
Varoufakis was in Downing Street for a meeting with George Osborne today. It’s interesting to compare and contrast the two men. Varoufakis is a serious economist who has interesting ideas and talks in specifics, while Osborne speaks mainly in platitudes with no background knowledge of the economy whatsoever. Here’s the vid. The interviewer is Italian, but the interview is in English.
alittleecon 
Reblogged this on sdbast.
This man makes Gideon Osborne look as though he has the mental capacity and economic knowhow of half a salted peanut. Which of course in truth that’s what Osborne has.
Mr Varoufakis is a Professor of Economics.
In the video Mr Varoufakis says if the EU used the profit made on Greek bonds, to help pay off Greece’s debt, then Greece’s debt might nearly be cut in half.
The question needs to be asked if the EU government is making a profit from all indebted nations?
There is also the theft from the Greek government reserves by the Nazis during the war. This might be many billions of war reparations due Greece from Germany.
As people have died from EU imposed austerity insisted on by Ms Merkel, it might perhaps be that as many people have died from austerity in Greece as Greeks starved during the war (there was no rationing in Greece because there was no food). So reparations for that loss as well?
The EU wanted to tax the Greece’s church because of all the donations coming to it in Greece, as it was the church who were feeding the starving of all ages, when the state could not by command of the EU’s troika.
There was and is no bank run in Greece.
The personal bank accounts have been emptied by a nil basic tax allowance and huge amount of multi layered taxes imposed on people, however cashless.
The left-overs of these taxes still have to be paid this year.
All the fearmongering about a Grexit to put off holidaymakers from going to Greece on holiday by our Coalition, is the usual hot air of electioneering for a general election in the UK that will have the lowest voter turnout in UK’s history, with the pundits saying that no UK party will get enough votes to form a majority government (save in Scotland’s parliament).
The Scottish National Party becoming a kingmaker in a multi party coalition, as Scotland will lose all its UK wide parties.
I spent many years in the family car driving from England to Greece for our summer holidays.
Through nation after nation doing perfectly well with its own currency, good roads, nice houses, full shops. Athens’ shops were bustling with customers. Then came the EU and the Euro.
Now Athens has a parliament surrounded by shops shut down for years.
Somewhere someone suggested the old currencies of Europe re-emerging by the stop gap measure of over-printing paper money Euros with the nation’s currency name.
But in any case I did hear that one of the biggest currency printing firms is here in England. So the end of the Euro would earn business taxes for the government in the UK from such a firm’s good luck in printing currencies for all the EU member states.
http://www.anastasia-england.me.uk