An excellent look at the current crisis situation in the EU. Varoufakis discusses some complex economic models but he explains them clearly, so it is possible to learn quite a bit about macroeconomics. The goes over the Bretton Woods agreement, then the financialization structure that took its place after the Nixon Shock (when the US stopped backing European currencies at a fixed rate convertible to gold). He also traces the history of the EU idea from its earliest stages as a heavy industry cartel centred in France and Germany. He sees this origin as a corporate cartel as a major shadow hanging over the further development of the EU as primarily a regulatory economic block for large corporate interests - rules based, technocratic and essentially apolitical, asocial and antidemocratic.
He also looks at some of the shady practices of the EU bank in Frankfort leading up to the collapse of Greece and several other smaller EU countries in 2009. Predatory loan practices similar to the subprime mortgage crisis in the US. Banks pushing loans to high risk businesses and countries that could never pay them back, and then cutting the loans up to make derivatives of "shared risk" that were then sold to other EU national banks - who of course threatened to collapse when the true value of the derivatives emerged in the 2009 crisis.
He sees the EU technocrats and governing bodies as suffering from dogmatism which keeps them from seeing both the real nature of the economic problems and also the possible solutions which could be enacted (except that they come from outside accepted dogmatic thinking).
The German political and banking elite comes off quite badly in his analysis.
A complex book, worth rereading.
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