opinions and articles and none of them seem to be reporting objectively. If one, however, follows and takes Varoufakis at his word, reform will come, and it will be humane reform, which is why he is greatly admired. He is a man of vision. Greece is in incredible hands, whether it realizes it or not. I am completely envious & see it as hopeful for the rest of the world.
Listen to Varoufakis from 15/05/2013, 18h, cinema Europa, Hall Müller, Zagreb, Croatia .
http://lybio.net/yanis-varoufakis-no-grexit-but-default-within-the-ezone/people/
My answer will come in three points [correction] in three parts.
Firstly forget Greece for just one second. If the Eurozone collapses, we are all going to be embroiled in the post modern 1930’s. If the Eurozone crashes and burns, I mean, I personally campaign against the Euro in the 1990’s. But we created it. So there are irreversibilites. If we give up the Euro, we are not going to go back to where we would have been if we didn’t have it. So it is one thing to say ‘we shouldn’t have it’ it’s quite another to ‘say we should get out of it’. Right?
And if the Euro, the way it was constructed, and the way that financialization proceeded during the golden age in those eight years, pretty good years of the Euro, and then ‘crush and burn’ and all that after that – with that history behind us, if now the Euro goes, we are going to have an massive depression in Germany, and stagnation in the rest of Europe. The global economy will not be able to take that shock, China is going to go into reverse, Brazil is going to see all the improvements in poverty rates and so on, go to smithereens, and therefore the global economy is going to be detrimentally effected if the Eurozone goes and that’s from the international perspective.
Now, let me speak from a Greek perspective. What we have done, as a ….what the Greek state has done, what the successive three different governments have done, since the debt crises, the debt exploded in early 2010, was a crime against humanity. So, I don’t defend the fact that we stayed in the Euro, following the prescriptions that were coming to us from Brussels and Frankfurt and so on, my proposal was, that Greece should simply announce that it is defaulting, just like Argentina did, within the Euro, in January 2010, and stick the finger to Germany and say “Well, you can now solve this problem by yourself”. Right?
Why am I not – why was I not supporting the idea, that we make an announcement that we are returning to the drachma.
In other words, why am I buying half of the Argentinean strategy, but not the other half?
Yes to the default, no to creating our own currency.
Well Argentina because had the peso Argentina – it had the currency that it could devalue.
It had a peg 1 to 1 between the peso and the U.S. dollar but it had the peso, Argentinians had the peso in their pockets. They had – the banks were stuffed with pesos — the ATMs would give you pesos.
And it was simply a matter of saying ‘well from now on we will devalue it’, but when you don’t have a currency, you can’t devalue it, all you can do is you can announce that you know in 8 months, we are going to have a currency, which by the way we’re going to devalue.
Now this, can you imagine —- a preemptive announcement of a devaluation 8 months before it happens, this is a recipe, is a recipe for having all wealth liquidated and leave the country unless then of course we have armed guards at the borders to stop people from bringing – taking their money out, but did would mean did we would have to get out of the European union.
And don’t forget that Greece doesn’t have something else that Argentina had. Argentina at the moment when it was defaulting and sticking the finger to the IMF, which I really applaud them for and I love them for it, okay?
Ah…they had large tracts of land capable of producing millions of tons of soya beans that China wanted to buy at that moment did; Greece does not have anything of this sort.
So if we given that we didn’t have a readymade export market, and we didn’t have a currency to devalue, it would be suicidal to get out of the drachma, in to the – what we should do, we should create circumstance of plan B, we should start the process of thinking of creating a currency in case we needed because – for —- not just because we may choose to leave the euro but because the euro may not exist after a while, if Germany leaves, I think because that is more likely for me as far as I’m concerned that Germany would depart from the euro, okay.
Now, just to finish off, I don’t have a dogmatic position on whether one should leave the euro or not. For me the question of costs and benefits of human suffering it is very simple.
Cyprus, this is what I’m going to go next week to Nicosia to argue should get out of the euro today; because they’re already out of the euro, they’ve already suffered the cost effects, they have capital controls, they have a destroyed banking system, why have the Troika visits on top of that, but Greece has not had that, yet.
So I think that from an internationalist and a Greek perspective and the European perspective, the most effective radical policy would be for a Greek government just rise up or a Greek Prime Minister or Minister of Finance to rise up in a coffin in the euro group — whatever and say folks we are defaulting, we shall not be repaying next May the 6 billion that supposedly owe – we owe the European Central Bank, my god, you’re not have a destroyed economy, which is borrowing from the European Stability Mechanist to pay it to the European Central back is not just idiotic, but its the epitome of misanthropy. Say no to that, but why you step out, put them in front of their contradictions, make them face the contradictions of the euro zone themselves because the moment the Greek Prime Minister declares default within the eurozone all hell will break loose and either they will have to introduce these shock absorbers, or the euro will die anyway, and then we can go to the drachma.
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He is a man born for this time in history. Shock doctrine (Naomi Klein) has been playing out globally, it is time to see what the solution will be and what reform, if any, will follow.
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