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Yanis Varoufakis

lines on the record: 79
first: 2026-05-03
most recent: 2026-05-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“The only worry that leaves you with is given that, you know, as you and I keep saying our political systems need refreshing and reviving, our economies are struggling with this Iran war that we talked about towards the end there is going to make the economic challenges even greater and inequality is growing the whole time is sort of hard to know where the next”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I thought Rory you might be kicking off with him Alazak Polanski, Ala Gary Stevenson, but I got the feeling you were quite impressed.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By destroying the economy and creating a massive depression. Well, there we are. Thank you for your time. It's been really interesting talking to you. I hope we were as engaging as Zach Polanski and Jeremy Corbyn on stage last night. I'm glad incredibly engaging. Thank you so much. And you know what? I prefer talking to people that I disagree with and people that I agree with. Okay. I mean, I think we agreed more than we expected to do various things. This is an upgrade. Anyway, thank you. Thank you.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the world, which will continue even if the war ends tomorrow morning. Why? Because on the one hand, Cospus inflation, as we know from the 1970s, is much more toxic than the tariffs. Secondly, because the AI splurge is now reversing. Why? Because AI is very energy intensive. So the increase in the price of electricity is seriously affecting investment in AI, especially in Europe, in Britain and elsewhere. Thirdly, because central banks are already on the way, if not of stop of increasing interest rates, some of them are thinking about this, they will stop reducing interest rates. And because unemployment was on the way up, unlike last year, already before the Iranian war, I really do hope that the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, do not increase interest rates because when you have cost inflation, interest rates rises are not going to contain that, except”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wave of these dives calls, but then you had a splurge in AI investment that cancelled it out and even overtook it. That's why the markets recovered very quickly. You had central banks reducing interest rates. That was also ameliorating for the Liberation Day shock and so on. But now, with a war in Iran, by the way, I think that this is to my detriment, my psychological detriment, but I thought that up until the war in Iran, Trump was winning everything. He won the tariff war with the European Union. He was decimating the Democrats in the United States. He created a Praetorian Guard turning federal government fascistic instrument. He was willing, unfortunately. Now with his Iran war, I think he's going to lose everything because he has unleashed a stagflationary wave that is going to substantially damage the West, if not the whole.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Today, I mean, Trump, I'm glad to say we haven't talked that much about Trump, but I think we have to a little bit. Yes, thank goodness. Well, I think we have to a little bit. He has been the author of two enormous shocks, tariffs and now Iran. And I'd just be interested in your take about what you think the consequence of each is going to be for the long term. Well, last year, after Liberation Day and the tariffs going through the roof and the market panic and so on, I was writing my operat saying that, look, let's not make a big deal out of it. It's going to be far less significant than other things that have happened. So the Nixon shock was far more important than the Trump shock. And you still think that? I still think that, in the sense that you also saw that a lot of these tariffs were absorbed, at least when it comes to basic goods, because demand for those basic goods is quite elastic. So it simply shrunk the profit margins of the vendors. And yes, there was a research.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Elected bicycle, Amazon didn't produce it. It operates like supposedly a marketplace, but it's not a market. Because the moment you enter Amazon, you exit the marketplace. You enter something resembling a Soviet planning system where an algorithm matches you with some seller. You have no capacity to talk to anyone. It's the GOS plan system of the Soviet Union, except it's owned by Jeff Bezos. And what does he get? 40% of everything you pay. So he's getting not ground rent, but cloud-renched. So if I'm right that this is a new form of capital, which is destroying markets and replacing them with these cloud fiefs like Amazon, Alibaba, Temu, and so on, and then profit shrinks shrinks because if you're the producer of the electric bicycle, your profit goes away. And it becomes a form of rent. You're going, so to conclude, welcome to techno-feudalism. And my final question then relates to stuff that's happening.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Today, we have, and you see, I don't want to get immersed in discussions about AI, about algorithms, surveillance capitalism. That's all important. But what I think is important, that's why I wrote this book, is to say something more than that. We have a new form of capital, brand new form of capital. All forms of capital since the inception of humanity as humanity were produced means of production, whether it's a fishing rod or a plough or an industrial robot. It's a machine, a tool that you produce not because you want it, but to produce something else with it. Produce the means of production. But what lives in our tablets, in our phones and so on, amazon.com and Uber and so on, they're not means of production. They are produced means of behavioral modification. So, you know, what Google does and what Uber does and so on, it doesn't produce anything. When you go into Amazon and you buy”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A very, very small number of people are benefiting massively from it and the rest of us are just slaves. Well, I think that is what I'm saying, but this is a symptom of the main point I'm making, not the cause. The point I'm making is in the book, is that we are experiencing a major transformation which can only be compared to what was happening in this country in the 1770s and 1780s, the transition from feudalism to capitalism. At that time, power shifted from those who owned land and that ownership equipped them with the power to extract ground rent to capitalism, as Adam Smith explained, as David Ricardo explained, as Karl Marx explained, where its ownership of the machinery that gives you an opportunity to orchestrate production and to extract surplus value from labor. That ascertained the world as we know it.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who had done a lot, sacrificed a lot, how quickly they can become lured by power. And, you know, just to completely trash their own principles. That is the greatest source of sorrow, and I'll carry it with me to my grave.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think people have a pretty good understanding of how soul destroying it is to be simultaneously sincere and a politician. Know as an academic, I was used to being around the table and attacking ideas and trying to learn from other people's attack of my ideas. But the moment you are on a television panel as a politician, you know, I realized that, you know, this guy who's sitting opposite me, if I convince him about something, then he loses his job. Or if he convinces me and I say this on air, then, you know, my part is going to be up in arms against me. And it is so, so crushing. But I think everybody understands that. But I'll tell you what the one insight I got. How easy it is, and I'm going to talk about the left now, because I'm a leftist. I don't know what it means to be a rightist beyond my comprehension. But I can tell you as a leftist that the worst aspect of that experience was the speed with which good comrades, you know, people that I thought the world of, who have done”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, absolutely. It's also because you have a situation where the left failed to come up with comprehensive plan that could inspire confidence in people. It's our failure and the liberal establishment's failure that led to the fascists rising up through the woodwork.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Written extensively along those lines. For me, 2008 was Our Generations 1929. In the same way, you cannot understand the world after 1929 if you don't start with the collapse of Wall Street, the way that this percolated.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, because now he's, you know, everyone who leaves Office can become a social democrat and a New Dealer, right? But not while they're in office. So the result is that, you know, with this socialism for bankers and austerity for everyone without having a surplus recycling mechanism within Europe to do that which Roosevelt did. Imagine if in Britain. Imagine if in Britain every county or let's say Scotland, Wales, North England, South England and London were separate states and you had no fiscal union, you had no common fiscal policy, but you had the pound. And each one of these jurisdictions looked after its own banks and had to borrow in the international markets to save those banks. What would have happened after 2008 in this country? And if they had to get together as heads of these sub parts of Britain to negotiate amongst the other how to bail each other out. And it would be a”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People, journalists in 2015 and beyond, whenever they interviewed me, they said, Mr. Varafakis, now, how could it be that everybody's wrong? And you're right. And the answer I gave them is, look, folks, if I went into this rooms with Christine Lagarde, Mario Draghi, Wolfgang Sch ⁇ uble, Merkel and so on, and they said to me that I was wrong. You know, I would look at myself in the mirror and start worrying, why am I wrong? Where am I wrong? I would be utterly, utterly unconfident, the opposite of confident about my position. But Alistair, none of them told me I'm wrong. You know, Christine Lagarde said I was completely right. Mario Draghi believes also that it was a mistake to have a common currency without a common treasury. He's come up with a draggy report, which is now saying things I was saying 10 years ago almost to the last number.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's gone finished. Well, because in our infinite wisdom, should I say, we created federal money, we have federated our money, we've created A common currency. So we have a huge central bank, a very significant central bank, and we have no treasury to have its back. And then we have 20 treasuries without the central bank to have their back. And each one of those treasuries has to look after banking systems and bail them out if needs be, without having a central bank. You do this if you want to destroy a continent. This is what we did. And they know that. They know that Alistair. Being, you know, the smart people, Kristen Lagarde, right? I”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a lot of problems getting elected these days because I tell the Greeks that there are no simple solutions and things along those lines. But I do believe that progressives have to be honest to the public. And we have to, on the one hand, things that bring out a sense of social justice like wealth taxes, but at the same time to say, look, there's going to be pain. We are going to have to invest into unpopular things in order to be able to produce the technologies that will make the difference between sustainability, both social sustainability and environmental sustainability and unsustainability.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's start with wealth taxes. Why am I not enthusiastic about wealth taxes? I believe that they are symbolically important. It's social justice that if you have That are the result of rent extraction, then you should pay. But I don't think that any government in the present sense of circumstances with the institutions that we have can seize enough of the wealth of the wealthy, however ill-gotten it was, in order to fund the NHS and in order to bring back some kind of income distribution which is palatable. On the question of housing, I have all these people that have borrowed through the nose what I need to tell them, what I would have to tell them to be true to my own understanding of the problem is that you know what, house prices have to come down. Some of you will have to have negative equity. That would be extremely painful. But the alternative to that is to keep inflating house prices in a way which is unsustainable and which is eating into the capacity of Britain to invest in industry. Unfortunately, politics is structured in such a way that if you tell the truth to the people, you can't get elected.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In not be invested, but for speculative purposes. And therefore, you have a whole middle class that has put so much money into housing. So housing has become a casino, and it absorbs all the economic energies. So when you talk about a growth plan and so on, there are no taxes or tax reductions, increases and so on that can sort out this mess on their own. You need something equivalent to what Roosevelt did in 1933 with a new deal.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The radical center used to say that as long as we deregulate and privatize everything is going to be great. And the left comes up with simplistic solutions like Syriza did in 2014. I'm not terribly popular with any of these political groupings, including on the left, because I keep saying things like, for instance, I'm all for wealth taxes for symbolic reasons. They are not going to solve the problem. I'm all for rent controls, but they're not going to solve the problem. If you look at our societies since the end of Bretton Woods, the neoliberal era, I mean, look at your country. For better or for worse, it doesn't matter whether it should be done or should not be done. Manufacturing was decimated in this country. It was replaced by shopping malls. That meant you have a gigantic trade deficit, which is financed through the...”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Begin with, I agree entirely with your depiction. This is what we do. But this is what the right does. I mean, the right and the left and the ultra-right, they are all populists in the end. Farage says, elect me, I will get rid of the foreigners and all your problems will be fixed, which is a tragic.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It wasn't exactly that what the Greek people said is we are rejecting the new credit card. Under conditions of rejection.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Promises that we are going to painlessly solve all their problems. And I thought that my relationship with that party was finished because I was invoked, that article was invoked by the center-right government at the time. They said to the Tsipras, the opposition leader at the time, oh, even your own Varoufakis is piling up on your economic manifesto. But it was only two or three months later that I was summoned and I was told that I was right and we will write the economic policy from scratch. And the only promise I went into that election with was that we will end this constant folly of taking more credit cards to repay unpaid debts.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I was mandated to do is to stop causing more damage, not just to the Greeks, but to the Europeans as well, because these credit cards were being paid by the working classes in Germany, in Slovakia, in Slovenia, and these people were getting really very angry because they didn't know what they were paying for. And one final thing, Rory, you mentioned the populist Syriza government. Look, I was never a member of that party. Why? I didn't believe in them. Because in September of 2014, that is four months before I became their finance minister, they came out with their economic manifesto. And I wrote an op-ed the next day in which I invoked your own churchill, saying that the only thing we have the right to offer the Greek people is blood, sweat, and tears, not populist.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kicking the can down the road to stop taking one credit card to pretend that you're paying the other credit card. And this is why I even had support from in this country Norman Lamont, the Adam Smith Institute. Were you not ashamed of this? I'm not at all ashamed of it because it was the right thing to do. The right thing to do was to say, look, we are sinful, not all of the Greeks, right? But the Greeks already together. We already suffered because you have to remember that by the time I entered government in 2015, Greek wages had gone down by 44%, pensions by 42%. My university budget had gone down from, I'm not going to give you the number, from 52 to 3. So effectively we couldn't even afford toilet paper. Hospitals were shutting down. So it's not a question of who should take the pain. The Greek people had taken the pain already.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“French and German bankers who are responsible for it, the Slovenes, the Slovakians, the Dutch, the Spaniards, the Portuguese, they were totally innocent and they were made to fork out the majority of the money so that Greece would take it in order to make whole the French and the German banks. This is what you do if you want to destroy European solidarity. So one of the reasons why Europe is going down the drain is because of those shenanigans. My decision to accept the position of the finance ministry was, of course, a very difficult one, as you can imagine, Rory. I'm a lefty. I didn't see this as a mandate to bring in socialism. I saw it as a mandate to do one really simple thing, that any neoliberal should want to do, which is to stop”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've got to remember that Greece went under in May of 2010. We took this huge loan that went to the French and German banks. It's like getting a credit card from which to draw money to repay a mortgage that you can't repay. That's complete madness, right? The banks were made whole by this first bailout, but the first credit card of the Greek state ran out very quickly. And now what happened was, and this was a crime against Europe. If you think about it, it's the French and German banks, right? And you have the French and German governments that don't want to bail out their own banks. Greece could not pay this money. If you're bankrupt, you're bankrupt. There's nothing you can do about that. You can pretend that you're not bankrupt by borrowing from the same people. Except that it's not exactly the same people. Now, the Slovenes, the Portuguese, the Irish, the Spaniards, who had nothing to do with that, I have no problem admitting that it's a Greek state and therefore the Greek people who voted for our governments.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolute terms, not relative terms, and out of that huge round of 120 billion, 91% went through the Greek Treasury straight back to the German and the French bank. So that's absolutely 91%.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Merkel, Chancellor Merkel, in April of 2009, was effectively told that within 24 hours she would have to give them 600 billion euros. She was the Ein Chancellor who was not giving a million to her health service because she was trying to keep her budget in the black. And suddenly she was told, she didn't understand why. $500,000, $600 billion had to be given overnight to the bankers. And she did that. And she thought that she had drunk the conium. And then she could move on. And a few months later, she was told she needs another 500 billion for the same bankers because Greece is going under the Greek state. And if the Greek state had gone under, then the Irish state would have gone under, the Portuguese state would gone under, and then they would need $2 trillion for their bankers. So they had to bail out the Greek state with the largest loan in the history of the world in”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the labor unions agreed, the establishment of labor unions. So there were many different forces at this. And now to your question. Once those bubbles built up, which I explained in answering in relation to the Deutsche Bank guy, and everything blew up, you have to remember that the main issue at the time was that the French and German banks had gone completely and utterly bankrupt. Deutsche Bank had a black hole in the spring of 2009, Rory and Alistair, which was 12 times the GDP of Germany because of the bets on bets on bets on bets. Remember, Margin Kohl and all that.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had a lot to win by entering the common currency managed to persuade organized labor to go along with them. Why? Because trade unions would go on strike when we had a drachma to catch up with inflation as happened here in the 1970s during your inflationary years under labor. And they would win a pay rise of 10%, then the next day inflation would eat it up. So the lie that was sold to the labor unions was if we get into the euro, whatever you gain through industrial disputes and so on is also key because there will be no inflation or very low inflation.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Motorweight hauls. You say, okay, the next 30 years we're going to receive all this money. So let's securitize this now, sell it to the markets after a much smaller amount and subtract that from the debt. So Goldman Sachs helped the industry of Germany and the state of Italy bring Italy in. And then what the Greeks did in government, and I know that because they were telling me some of these people were friends of mine in the Greek government at the time, they simply copied what the Italians did. And they reduced in the same way, in the same inventive way. Is that because they wanted to be in? They wanted to be in. The Greek bourgeoisie wanted to be in. Why? Because if you own a mansion in the leafy suburbs of Norhafens, you don't want it to be denominated in a currency that it's devaluing. You prefer it to be in the hard currency, right? So if you're rich, you want to go into the hard currency zone. At the same time, the people who”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“GDP ratio of Italy using Goldman Sachs. So effectively, Goldman Sachs, who know how to do these things, disguised part of the debt. How did they do it? One example is you securitize the various receipts of the state for the next 30 years of tolls.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Take it from the beginning. Well, to begin with, Greece was not on their either. It was a Pipsquick country in the side that didn't care. But they cared about Italy. Because if you were Volkswagen, you were really peeved every time your car gained competitiveness vis- ⁇-vis a fiat, an Italian car, and the central bank of Italy would devalue the Italian currency, the Lira, and suddenly you would lose that competitive advantage. So German industry really wanted Italy in the Deutschmark zone, in the Eurozone. So they wanted to get them in. The Italians had a debt-to-GDP ratio, which was much, much above what the Buddhist Bank, the Central Bank of Germany, considered to be the maximum that should be allowed. But Volkswagen industry, against the Buddhist bank, wanted Italy in for the reasons I explained. So they found a way of manipulating the debt to GDP.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And up until now, we couldn't give you the loans because you had a drachma which was falling, so your incomes could be falling vis- ⁇-vis the Deutschmark. But now you are going to have a Deutschmark. So you are our favorite clients. We are going to give you lots of money. And I said, yeah, but what happens when this creates huge bubbles? And then they burst and indebtedness ensures that the Greeks won't be able to repay you back. And he said, well, then we'll take your houses, which is exactly what is happening today one and a half million homes in a country of 10 million people are being repossessed by foreign vultures. So hold on. Let me get this right. You've got the bankers there, but were the big governments, the French, the Germans, did they want Greece inside the euro? And if so, what were their reasons? Or were they brought into the euro on conditions that they never met and probably never could meet? And then when you became the finance minister and the bailout is happening, is the bailout happening?”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so he was enthusiastic about Greece going into the euro, and I wasn't. So I said to him, why are you enthusiastic? He said, you know, because you Greeks are our wet dream. I said, yeah, go on. He said, well, look, we are a wash with money, German banks, reflecting the trade surpluses of the German economy. We have a trade surplus. A lot of money is coming into your banks. The Germans didn't want to borrow that. So what is the nightmare of a banker? Deutsche Bank, having money and nobody to borrow it from you. But he said, you guys, you know, you have two things that we really love. Firstly, you own your own homes. No Greeks had mortgages back then. 80% were fully owned by Greeks. I mean, they were at very expensive houses, but they were fully owned. And the second thing you have is a thirst for cash, for credit, because credit was very severely circumscribed in Greece.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, this is a big story because there are many different kinds of interests that we're in favor of that. It wasn't just one force. But let me complete what happened was the moment we entered the euro, it was game over. And I'll tell you when I realized that. I realized in 1998 I was in an aeroplane flying from Frankfurt to New York. And I was sat next to a gentleman from Deutsche Bank who was, he found out, I'm Greek and he said, oh.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Crisis would never have taken place. The euro is responsible for it. Why? Because up until the year 2000, Greece was a meddling quasi-corrupt, quasi-inefficient state country, political economy. The Greek trachma was constantly falling but gradually vis- ⁇-vis the Deutschmark, the British pound, reflecting the lack of competitiveness of the Greek economy. But these gradual devaluations restored the competitiveness of Greek tourism, of Greek olive oil and so on and so forth. So it was manageable. It was a kind of steady state equilibrium of relative backwardness. So who wanted Greece?”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can not only agree with you, but I can raise it to the end. The Greek bureaucracy was astonishingly. Mind boggeringly, disgustingly, not only inefficient, but also corrupt. I had no doubt about that. For a moment, but the problem is the Greek state did not fall flat and say on its face because of our bureaucracy. I wanted to see the Greek bureaucracy cut down in size, be rendered efficient, being forced to actually move from a situation where out of ten public servants, two worked and the other eight scrounged on the work of the two. So now I can agree entirely on that. But the reason why we're talking about Greece now, and the reason why I became finance minister is because of that crisis. Now, why did that crisis happen? Suppose, Rory, that in the year 1999, the year 2000, when our Social Democrats ushered us into the euro, they had decided, no, it's not a good idea, let's not do that. If they had kept us out of the euro, the Greek...”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, it wasn't all Rory, when I arrived in Greece in 2000, the year 2000, you have to remember I left Greece in 1978 and arrived almost 40 years old in Greece in the year 2000. And I first encountered the Greek bureaucracy. You know how dogs sort of do this when they simply do not comprehend what's happening?”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fascism is always there in the background. Occasionally a good recession gives the way I went. So I could sense that. And then John Hardwins and the university starts going down the drain of this managerialism. I realized that the first time Rory, I realized that the university was turning into a place I didn't want to be in was when the good parking spots next to my office were reserved for managers who were employed to manage us even though they had no academic credentials whatsoever. I thought, well, okay, now, this is the beginning of the end.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yes, then even before John Howard, a third-rate version of Thatcher, was elected, I could sense, you know, it's just like here You can sense the change of the environment through the rise of xenophobia. I mean, when I arrived, there was no inkling of xenophobia. By 1993, because of the recession in 1991, this is what recessions do. They create discontent can easily morph into xenophobia, into misogyny, into this kind of malignancy. And I could hear the first voices against the Aborigines that they were scrunchers, that they were exploiting the white population as if.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The film industry, the film industry was having a renaissance in Australia at the time because of public money that was going into developing local culture. The pubs were fleet with wonderful bands. You know, Ramshaku bands. You would go on the same night to three pubs, have three pints of beer, and listen to three different bands. The weather also helps between you and”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, where we can agree, I mean, we can have this discussion, but I can tell you from my heart that arriving in Australia at that time after Thatcher was, as I said, I could breathe again because there was multiculturalism that was being celebrated. There was SBS television and radio, which is a mini-United Nations. If you go to the SBS building in North London, you have 130 language departments within it, even Yiddish is being practiced. And this is all public service. The university was, the way universities used to be before Thatcher. In other words, you know, we didn't have that culture of writing everything down and accounting and research assessment exercises where all everybody is just crazy writing down little brownie points that everybody else has won or not won.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I am a proud carrier of an Australian passport. And I have an Australian daughter, by the way. Without getting permission, without the permission. Look, when I arrived, this was the. But end the almost conclusion of the Hawk era, Bob Hawke's government with Paul Keating being the treasurer at the time. And even though they were too right-wing for me, it was a breath of fresh air to be.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Beware of the Communist Party, and he taught me this as a member of the Communist Party. So, you know, for me, being nuanced was always part of that. Anyway, look, at some point, I got out of the blue and offered to go to Sydney. And I said, no. And then they rolled back to me saying, don't be stupid. We have the summer here. We'll give you three times the salary. Come for six months, and if you don't like it, you go back to Cambridge. And so I said, okay, all right, fine. It was a summer. It was 1988 when they had the bicentennial celebrations. And I thought, okay, I'll escape British winter for six months. I went there and it was actually quite lovely because it was very backward No, no, but backwards can be very good.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know what I mean? I thought that I was solidaristic to the communities that were being wrecked by Thatcher. I was solidaristic to the workers who worked for the print units without actually liking the print units. I considered them to be male chauvinist, rightist, you know, pseudo-left unions. So I was constantly fighting a war which I was losing without actually believing in the leadership of my own side. So when Thatcher won the third time, I thought, oh, goodness gracious me, what's going to happen now? And I made a not semi-subconscious decision that if I find a way of getting out of here, I shall, because I just can't face up to this anymore, I couldn't face up even to the Labour Party at the time, right? I mean, it wasn't just Tory versus Labour. My own side of politics, I've always been very suspicious of. Even my hard left, as you would call it, my father taught me to...”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dispute and so on. And you know, I had this. I'm not your conventional lefty. I mean, I knew we were fighting the wrong war. I mean, I was an ecologist back then, and we were fighting to preserve the coal communities by preserving a polluting industry”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Percent cuts every year, which meant that vice chancellors and deans had to get rid of people. And because they had tenures back then, they had to lean on them and actually make their life a misery until forced to quit psychological terrorism. So when we crossed each other in the corridor, they looked at me as a cheap young laborer that was about to replace them. And, you know, even if independently of the actual personal relations, that's a very dark environment in which. So I was teaching at the University of East Anglia, and then I shifted to Cambridge, and I thought that that was a pinnacle of my life until then, until I realized that the circumstances there were actually quite dire as well. And then Thatcher wins the third time. And the bleakness all around me, I mean, I was part of the 1984 minor strike, the 1986-7 whopping disaster.”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am a permanent refugee, yes, but let me be a bit more nuanced about this. Look, I'm not that fanatical. It's not that somebody I didn't like, Margaret Thatcher, one third time when I left. No. It was a steady deterioration of the academic environment in Britain under fascism, which was the result of the cuts. Because, you know, I cut my teeth in, I started my undergraduate degree in 1978, then she comes in 1979. By the time I was a lecturer, I was a despised figure in the department in which I was, not because of my nastiness, but because I was very young lecturer, I was very cheap because of being very low down in the rankings. Older professors and lecturers, people whom I looked up to, saw me as a threat because it was a time when, you remember back then we had 10”
2026-05-03 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source