An interesting look at the crash of 2009 and the post WW2 economic order in the west. Varoufakis writes well on what could otherwise be a boring or obscure (or both) topic.
His central idea is the idea of profit recycling. There will always be nations that accumulate more wealth, that will be more developed - what keeps the system in balance is some mechanism (often an investment mechanism, either private or government) that cycles some of the surplus wealth back into the poorer or less developed areas. A classic example of this is the US Marshall Plan after WW2, and their heavy investment in Japan after the war. U.S. excess wealth was recycled in the form of low-interest government and business loans.
In the 60s, as the U.S. become a debtor nation instead of a surplus nation, a more complex system was developed, where profits of U.S. surplus trading partners came back into the U.S. either as government bond purchases or as investment in Wall Street. This money was used to provide loans to government, companies and individuals to support development projects but especially high levels of consumption through debt - which in turn benefited trading partners... An ingenious system. However, when the banks got greedy and started high risk lending practices, the house of cards collapsed when consumer liquidity collapsed. With the collapse of the U.S., this leaves the whole system without the necessary recycling mechanism, which explains the very slow recovery of the world economy to date.
Varoufakis maintains that that the biggest weakness in the E.U is that there is no similar recycling mechanism for distributing excess wealth from Germany in particular. This leads to inevitable collapse as the less developed nations become poorer and poorer. German and French banks also indulged in risky lending practices similar to American banks.
Varoufakis is not a popular guy. I suspect his ideas are too challenging for the status quo economists and politicians...
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