The new Yanis Varoufakis book

It is well written and consists mostly of reasoned economic arguments about the unworkability of various aspects of EU and eurozone affairs.  It is not a kiss and tell memoir about what really happened or did not happen in Greece in the critical months of last year.

Here is a good FT Martin Sandbu review of the book, excerpt:

He [Varoufakis] clearly, and correctly, thinks Greece should have defaulted on its sovereign debt and Ireland should have restructured its banks in 2010. But if alternative policies did in fact exist, which leaders could have pursued but chose not to, then a fatalistic monetary theory that blames everything on the euro’s design serves, paradoxically, to exonerate the mistakes of those leaders. That may not be his intention, but Varoufakis glosses over why national governments repeatedly declined to restructure debt before it was refinanced by the rescue funds. Above all he does not mention why he, as finance minister, did not restructure Greece’s banks early in his tenure, so as to undo their dependence on the European Central Bank, which last summer forced Athens to accept a third bailout by shutting down banking liquidity. This very partial focus is why Varoufakis’s literary references are so telling. The rage expressed by Thomas and Thucydides’ Melians is not a constructive anger but a cover for helplessness. Neither death nor the Athenians are moved by their rage. Nor, I suspect, will eurozone decision makers be moved by Varoufakis’s.

You can order the book here, it is titled And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe’s Crisis and America’s Future.

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