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In this provocative book, Yanis Varoufakis—the fiery former finance minister in Greek’s new Syriza-led government—explodes the myth that financialization, ineffective regulation of banks, and generalized greed and globalization were the root causes of the global economic crisis. Rather, he shows, they are symptoms of a much deeper malaise, one that can be traced all the way back to the Great Depression, then through the stagflation of the 1970s, when a “Global Minotaur” was born. Today’s deepening crisis in Europe, Varoufakis shows, is just one of the inevitable signs of the weakening Minotaur—of a global system that is now as unsustainable as it is unbalanced. Rather than simply diagnose a problem, however, Varoufakis also offers a solution, a program for introducing reason into what has become a perniciously irrational economic order.
An essential, powerfully polemical account of the hidden histories that continue to shape our world and economy today, this book from a major player on the stage of world finance, and with a new introduction by Paul Mason, will be essential reading for economists, policy makers, and regular citizens alike.
- Sales Rank: #159997 in Books
- Brand: imusti
- Published on: 2015-07-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .90" w x 5.00" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 304 pages
Features
Review
"The emerging rock-star of Europe's anti-austerity uprising." (Daily Telegraph)
"The book is one of those exceedingly rare publications of which one can say they are urgent, timely and absolutely necessary." (Terry Eagleton)
"Varoufakis is a rare economist: skilled at explaining ideas, happy to join in public debates and able to put his discipline in a broader context." (Aditya Chakrabortty, Guardian)
"Yanis is one of the best, brightest and most innovative economists on the planet." (Steve Keen, author of Debunking Economics)
"Clearly and strongly written, with logical organization building towards simple conclusions, the book is an easy yet rewarding read ... perhaps should become the standard way we think about the nature of our increasingly dysfunctional world economy." (Joel Campbell, International Affairs)
"In the most comprehensive guide to the contemporary economic crisis yet written, Varoufakis traces out the path from post-war US economic supremacy to the current predicament. This book's provocative thesis, written in lively and impassioned prose, is that neither the US nor the EU nor any other nation can now restore robust global growth. Whether you agree or disagree, this book's lively and impassioned prose will engage you both heart and mind, and hold you in thrall to the last word. The Global Minotaur is a masterwork that registers for all time the challenge of our time." (Gary Dymski, University of California, Riverside)
"If you want to know how serious the current crisis is, you should read his book. With much eloquence, Yanis Varoufakis argues that the current financial problems are connected to the emerging fault lines of the international monetary system. The US (the Minotaur) used to govern the international monetary system, but no more; and this crucially means that there is no surplus recycling mechanism that can reliably stabilise the world economy. The elephant in the room, so to speak, is a stumbling Minotaur." (Shaun Hargreaves-Heap, University of East Anglia)
About the Author
Yanis Varoufakis was the Greek Minister of Finance and an MP for Syriza. He was also professor of economics at the University of Athens and visiting professor at the University of Texas.
Most helpful customer reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Worth reading for 2 things irrespective of whether you agree with the author's overall thesis.
By Nicolaus G. Bauman
You don't have to agree with Varoufakis' analysis (I happen to disagree with them but only on the micro level: broadly I think he's right on) to learn a couple of important things about the crisis of 2008. These two things are worth reading the book for ALONE:
1) Trade imbalances (and what causes them) is the source of nearly all the world's economic instability. Most of economic planning revolves around what to do about them (see 2 below)
2) Since WWII, the world economy has been carefully planned, from top to bottom, largely by the US, Japan and Germany. This plan was called The Bretton Woods System and Veroufakis explains it plainly and clearly with the right level of detail. Anyone who yaks on about how the US is an economic powerhouse because of its "free markets" doesn't know what they are talking about.
Lastly, Veroufakis discusses two inherent problems with Capitalism that are the root causes of 1 and 2, above. I won't tell you what they are, you'll have to read the book. It's rather interesting and dives directly to heart of many sacred cows of our civilization. Read it an decide for yourself.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
A great review of recent history in the global macro economic sphere.
By Matthew Rapaport
This man is a delight to read. He is perhaps a sconce more to the left politically than me, but he has my sympathies and his description of the functioning of the American system in world finance from world war II to the present (at least to about 2010) is superb. I would love to see him update his views to 2016 because the mythical beast he declared mortally wounded in the crash of 2008 still, it seems, has some life left in it, but its thrashing around has left deep social and political marks on both the U.S. in the present election season and throughout Europe. If you are looking for an overview of the global macro economic situation this would be a good place to start. Non technical and an easy read. The author tells a great tale.
28 of 32 people found the following review helpful.
A failure of planning, not of markets
By Noah Leed
Like David Stockman, Mr. Varoufakis sees 1971 as a fatal turning point for the global economy and rejects the mainstream view of recent decades as a benign "great moderation." The viewpoints of the two authors come from very different positions on the economic and ideological spectrum. There is much in common, though, as the global post-1980 corruption of capitalism is presented here, from the left, as a "Global Minotaur" much as Mr. Stockman presented it, from the right, as a "Great Deformation."
Mr. Varoufakis offers a well-written and compelling case that the "Crash of 2008" should not be looked at simply in terms of various contributing proximate causes, but rather from a broader geopolitical perspective going back nearly a century, in which those many causal factors might be seen as symptoms of a much deeper systemic problem.
In short: it's the currency, stupid. The decision (of the Bretton Woods conference near the close of WWII) to structure a global monetary system around the US dollar was a flawed "Global Plan" that, when the system collapsed in 1971, gave rise to a "Global Minotaur" of ever-deepening US twin deficits. In this process, USG deficit-spending helps fund massive trade deficits, which in turn generate massive capital inflows to Wall Street, which... help fund more USG deficit-spending!
And, of course, these inflows help enrich the bankers, speculators and financial elites of Wall Street in the process, as they use this capital as a base on which to make loans and to slice, dice and re-package debt, and then sell and trade debt as a form of "savings." The financialization of the US economy and global trade imbalances that grew along with the rise of this debt-monster contributed to inevitable crisis, leaving the future of the Global Minotaur in question. I agree with this assessment, but do not fully share the author's approach to, and analysis of, this process (or economics in general).
Mr. Varoufakis observes how the participants of Bretton Woods were keen on developing a comprehensive global system that would help prevent another crisis-with-a-capital-C like The Depression, would resolve the problems of "excess surpluses" that result from imbalanced trade, and also would allow war-ravaged economies to rebuild and thrive in spite of greatly-inflated national currencies.
Rather than return to a classical international gold standard, the new system would be a choice between a newly-created international currency (the "bancor" proposed by Keynes) or a gold-exchange standard featuring the dollar, where world currencies would be valued at fixed exchange rates in terms of a gold-backed dollar, itself pegged to 1/35 oz. of gold. Naturally, as the only economic power left standing, and with a desire for control, wealth and privilege similar to that which the British Empire experienced with its pound sterling dominating global trade for so many decades, the USG prevailed and the new global dollar standard was born.
Unfortunately, Mr. Varoufakis does not go back quite far enough in time, as he omits any detailed discussion of what actually led to the Great Depression, and of the vital differences between a "gold-exchange standard" and a TRUE gold standard. He incorrectly states Bretton Woods proposed to "guarantee full gold convertibility for anyone, American or non-American." That would be a pure, honest-to-goodness gold standard, which was never on the table. The Bretton Woods gold-exchange standard limited gold redemption to ONLY participating member states holding official dollar reserves. (In fact, FDR had made it illegal as of 1933 for US citizens to own or trade gold bullion anywhere in the world. Only in 1975 could US citizens again legally own and trade gold, and after 1933 there was NEVER a time they could redeem dollars for gold.)
The reality is, the new Bretton Woods global reserve-currency system had the same basis as the system emerging from the 1922 Genoa monetary conference: namely, a system where reserves (and thus loans and new currency) could be based on unlimited paper PROMISES of gold rather than on quite-limited ACTUAL gold. So oddly, in an attempt to prevent another Great Crisis, politicians and monetary authorities came up with a new international system closely resembling the inherently inflationary one that was in place at the time of the LAST (and quite recent) Great Crisis. Go figure.
While it is true that the US remained on a gold standard during WWI, and that other countries returned to one after the war, in global terms the classical gold standard had died with WWI. International gold flows were henceforth managed and manipulated through embargoes and sterilization. That pre-1914 system had been the market mechanism for re-balancing global trade and capital flows. The author indirectly acknowledges this in his discussion of how economies adjust in relation to each other during extended periods of net-importing or net-exporting, changing the relative costs of a nation's imports and exports and shifting their balance. Yet he ignores discussion of the massive disruptions and distortions of global trade and capital flows, not to mention global inflation, that came with WWI and the interwar years and that certainly contributed to the depth and global nature of the Great Depression.
Nevertheless, Mr. Varoufakis spends many pages discussing policy efforts of US officials over the decades following WWII as they attempted to establish currency zones and support the re-industrialization of Germany and Japan, and do so in ways that both promoted global stability and dramatic domestic growth. He appears quite confident that he knows the driving motives and intentions behind nearly all these policy decisions, giving a conspiratorial tone to his narrative. Yet he concludes this "Global Plan" provided capitalism with its "finest hour" (the sustained growth and shared prosperity of the 1950s and 60s) in spite of the plan's fatal flaw.
The flaw, of course, was that as the USG began flooding the globe with dollars to provide liquidity and support global growth, it also spent ample dollars domestically. In order to maintain their currency pegs to the dollar, other nations needed to print those currencies and buy up some of the dollars. What started as a global dollar shortage, as the USG sought to establish the dollar as the dominant reserve currency, quickly transitioned into a global dollar glut. Under the Bretton Woods agreement, nations could trade dollar reserves for gold, and during the 1960s they did so in earnest as they feared the dollar would keep losing value against gold. The massive outflows of gold from the US forced Nixon to close the gold window, as of 1971.
Mr. Varoufakis neglects to mention that several economists, including Rueff, Triffin and Hazlitt, had pointed out (in the 1940s and 1950s) the inflationary nature inherent in a system that used a single national currency as the global reserve. So this collapse of Bretton Woods should have come as no surprise... it was baked in, and was truly inevitable. While this two-decade golden age saw wonderful growth, to say the system itself was a wonderful idea seems odd, as this "Global Plan" contained the very seeds of its own destruction. It would be like saying the "best years" of an athlete's career might be the few seasons he uses steroids and puts up impressive numbers... but if that steroid use is assured to bring health issues (and shame and disrepute) and shorten his career, the steroid use would not seem a master stroke. A grand plan is not so grand if it is fatally flawed and unsustainable.
In addition, if this "Global Plan" provided capitalism with its "finest hour" we have to question our definition of capitalism. Shouldn't that term apply to an economy driven primarily, if not exclusively, by markets? Yet the author has spent dozen of pages describing extensive and pervasive policy interventions into every major economy and market on the planet, including the global markets for money itself. What he is describing is a global system and economy that has been meticulously planned and tinkered with so as to yield the planners' most-desired results. Whatever form of capitalism that might be, it is certainly not a pure form of free market capitalism, which one could argue died right along with the international gold standard in 1914.
To suggest that markets were largely allowed to do as they wish under this system is akin to allowing slaves to do largely as they wish under a system of slavery. No matter how freely slaves are allowed to move about, they are not free.
Mr. Varoufakis notes that the dollar's established role as global reserve currency gave the USG the ability to "print money at will without any global institutionalized constraints." The single global restraint was the ability of nations to redeem dollars for gold, which the USG unilaterally revoked. (There was also a supposed domestic restraint, the 25% gold cover, that was repealed by Congress in 1968.) It is that total lack of restraint that created the Global Minotaur, because the ability to create public money at will inevitably led to what Mr. Varoufakis observes as Wall Street's ability to essentially print PRIVATE money (credit/debt) at will and without constraint.
But the plain fact is, a debt-based monetary system means ALL money is created without real constraint simply by the creation of loans. When banks lend, the accounting entry creates money by creating a debt. It is the new debt-money that creates "savings" and only then, AFTER the loan is created, do banks need to find the reserves to back it.
So where Mr. Varoufakis errs in his analysis is his consideration of the vast flows of capital to be simply the surpluses, or profits, resulting from the productive output of the net-exporting economies and their industries. He neglects to mention the fact that to remain competitive major net-exporters of recent decades, like Japan and China, must manipulate the exchange rates of their currencies by buying up huge amounts of incoming dollars. They do this by printing (creating out of thin air) huge amounts of their OWN currencies. This in addition to massive amounts of money (debt) creation by private lenders. In China, for example, credit market debt has exploded fourfold from $7 trillion to about $28 trillion in under a decade.
So while the author notes that European countries engaged in inflationary money-printing during the 1960s to keep pace with the global increase of dollars, he fails to discuss how currency creation by foreign central banks accelerated AFTER the collapse of Bretton Woods. Trillions of dollars of foreign holdings of USG debt represent not only money that the the USG has spent into the global economy, but money that has been duplicated in the foreign currencies and ALSO injected into the global economy (with much of it serving to drive up global commodity and asset prices and boost wealth inequality).
It is interesting to consider that Mr. Varoufakis quite correctly critiqued Thomas Piketty for conflating "capital" with "wealth" yet it appears that Mr. Varoufakis himself does something similar. The vast flows of "capital" that he discusses consist largely newly-created credit, of nominal wealth that is simply loaned and borrowed into existence by both private AND public sectors. Yet many continue to refer to this mountain of debt-based paper wealth as "capital" or as "global savings." It is not truly so.
While the surplus dollars get recycled back to the US (where many flow into USG debt instruments, to further fund deficit-spending), the newly-created currency of the exporting nation is spent or invested in THAT country, helping feed price inflation or asset inflation and serving as a basis on which new loans are backed. In this manner, the fiat reserve-currency system contributes to global monetary and credit expansion on a huge scale.
Like surpluses (profits) from productive output, true savings or hard assets (such as gold) do not arise out of thin air, nor do they instantly vanish in the same manner. The reason the current crisis, like that of the 1930s, is so great is that debt-based wealth CAN vanish in an instant, and does, the moment it is acknowledged that the debt is unpayable. The magic of leverage is that a viable debt serves as a monetary base upon which more debt (money) can be created. This new wealth serves as a basis for demand, to fund investment or consumption. But when the debt is deemed NOT viable and disappears, so does the money... and so does the demand. This is why Germany does not want to admit Greek debt is bad... it signals a mass destruction of money (and of demand) that is really only the tip of the iceberg.
Richard Duncan has suggested that the system arising with Bretton Woods, and especially after its collapse in 1971, should be termed "creditism" rather than "capitalism." Perhaps we could call it "wealthism." Likewise, the tile of the Piketty book might better have been "Wealth in the Twenty-First Century" or "Credit in the Twenty-First Century" rather than the misleading "Capital in the Twenty-First Century."
So while it occurs to Mr. Varoufakis that unchecked expansion of credit/debt (and the associated absence of global balancing mechanisms) gave rise to the Crash of 2008, he ignores it as a root cause in the Crash of 1929. I would suggest it was. Back then, as now, massive amounts of private-sector debt built up. Yet rather than feed price inflation this newly created credit fed the inflation of asset prices, greatly enriching (on paper) the wealthy holders of assets and causing a spiking of wealth inequality.
The roots of the Great Depression are only hinted at in the book, in a section that containis an interesting discussion of "value" that must be addressed. Mr. Varoufakis claims that "the more output that is squeezed from a given amount of human creative input, the less the per-unit value of the output. If value requires human agency (then) the more successful corporations are at replacing human labor with machines, the lower the value our societies will be producing. Thus profit margins decline. The Crisis then starts." This apparent throwback to the labor theory of value is all wrong.
Yes, "value" requires human agency, but only in its perception, not in its production. Otherwise, there would be no value to a sunset or a wild strawberry. Value is subjective, and can only be determined by each individual. If sun-ripened berries are picked by a machine rather than a human, do I value them less? Perhaps. But if they are picked by the machine to be sweeter and "better" I may value them more. There is no intrinsic change in value in a machine-picked berry... any change in value comes from the entity (me) who is perceiving value.
As machine labor replaces human labor we get a decline in per-unit price, not per-unit value. A thousand holes dug by spoon are not more valuable than those dug by a robotic backhoe, but will certainly be more expensive. The machine brings down the cost of producing each hole, yet the value of the hole (if any) is unaffected. If I value a hole solely for the utility it brings me, irrespective of its cost, I will value the spoon-dug one and the machine-dug one equally.
A decline in price assuredly does not mean a decline in profits. Ford's Model-T declined in price year after year. It became more valued by more consumers due to price declines, yet Ford made handsome profits by reducing per-unit costs of production. This increase in output is little different in principle than the use of a net (a machine, or capital good) to catch thousands of fish versus catching only a few by hand.
There is no doubt that as prices fall, some producers will be unable to compete and go out of business. While this is a crisis for those producers, it is not a crisis for consumers and societies and economies at large. A better word for it would be "progress" as it is the means by which higher living standards evolve.
It is also false to suggest, as the author does, that price deflation always results in deferred consumption and destroys prospects for growth. (Does a CPI declining at 2% really stop one from buying a major appliance, when retailers run periodic promotions that discount that appliance by 10%-30% regardless of minor variations in the direction of the CPI?) There is no reason not to embrace, rather than resist, gentle price deflation when the economic conditions cause it to arise. That would include a situation where a chronic net-importer needs to become more productive (rather than more indebted) to fund that net consumption.
In sum, Mr. Varoufakis may be correct in observing that artificial currency unions need artificial adjustment mechanisms to recycle surpluses. I believe he is correct to suggest it can be a great error to apply free-market dogma to policy decisions that are being applied to mixed, managed systems that are not actual free markets. But there is no basis for his implication that truly free markets, should they be allowed to function, cannot self-correct and are doomed to collapse. That does not mean they are not prone to crisis, but he (like Keynes) seems to think they are prone to utter catastrophe if not centrally planned and managed.
In fact, it is the planners' attempts (and temporary successes) in avoiding small crises, bankruptcies and failures that helps lead to catastrophic ones. Up until the Great Depression, every major episode of price inflation was followed by deflation. The efforts of policy makers and monetary authorities to bail out insolvent entities -- to extend and pretend -- is part of the eight-decade effort to avoid deflation and credit contraction at all costs. Under the current monetary arrangement, the desire for more money leads unavoidably to more debt, much of it unpayable. The ultimate cost of this hyper-creation of credit, and of saving debt at all costs, may well end in the greatest destruction of paper wealth in history.
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