Yanis Chimaras Quotes

My hope that Thatcher would inadvertently bring about a new political revolution was well and truly bogus. All that sprang out of Thatcherism were extreme financialisation, the triumph of the shopping mall over the corner store, the fetishisation of housing and Tony Blair. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

Poor children, typhoons (the turbulent waters) washed their house collapsed, their homelessness, family members dead. Do not you want to help them? If you want to help them, please donate the money to typhoon Haiyan ~ Yanis Yingnan JI

Europe has twice already in the past hundred years dragged the planet down into appalling quagmires. It can do so again. Europe (as the New Dealers understood in the 1940s) is too important to leave to us Europeans. The whole world has a stake in a victory for rationality, liberty, democracy and humanism in the birthplace of those ideas. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

General Motors is alive and kicking today, it is because in 2009 President Obama's administration wrote off 90 percent of its debt. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

The many refugees are not a Greek or German problem. They are a European problem. We should therefore develop a common strategy. That's why I am launching a cross-border movement for more democracy. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

I was told once by a leftwing scholar that as a Marxist, you have to do two things: always be optimistic and always have a view about everything. That advice still sounds good to me. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

Once their gaze turned back toward Europe, the puzzle dissolved: West Germany was the obvious equivalent and, indeed, a splendid candidate for the role of the global plan's European shock-absorbing pillar - certainly not Britain. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

Nothing prepares a people for authoritarianism better than defeat, followed closely by national humiliation and an economic implosion. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

Alas, this was an open invitation to print one's own money! No wonder Warren Buffet took one look at the fabled CDOs and described ~ Yanis Varoufakis

Nothing is more boring than talking to people who share my opinion anyway. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

Greece was merely the laboratory where these failed policies were being tested and developed before their implementation everywhere across Europe. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

This book originally aimed at pressing a useful metaphor into the service of elucidating a troubled world; a world ~ Yanis Varoufakis

If the British think they can simply detach from the continent and sail towards the USA or China, then they are mistaken. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

To put it slightly differently, small sovereign nations, like Iceland, have choices to make within the broader constraints created for them by nature and by the rest of humanity. However limited these choices might be, Iceland's body politic retains absolute authority to hold their elected officials accountable for the decisions they have reached within the nation's exogenous constraints, and to strike down every piece of legislation that it has decided upon in the past. (...) In this sense, small, powerless Iceland continues to enjoy full sovereignty while the comparatively omnipotent European Union has been stripped of all forms of sovereignty. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

The social inefficiency of capitalism is going to clash at some point with the technological innovations capitalism engenders, and it is out of that contradiction that a more efficient way of organising production and distribution and culture will emerge. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

Anyone who toys with the idea of cutting off bits of the eurozone hoping the rest will survive is playing with fire. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

Count Coudenhove-Kalergi put it succinctly in one of his speeches when he declared his ambition that Europe "supersedes democracy" and that democracy be replaced by a "social aristocracy of the spirit."52 ~ Yanis Varoufakis

Fences and borders are a sign of weakness. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

Flammflorbs, archypodsplays, clinker crabs, dorsaldorydabbs, mingslakks, linglimes, occocobbers, firgengobblers, smitesnides, orkusta shelled bunkbarnacles, balootabinks, jorgentua jellyfish, tungol widders, teleosti chimaras, and things stranger, yet to be named, Klubbe and his crew members observed through their portholes, lit by the lamps of their submarine's lanterns. ~ Philip Dodd

This strategy, which was then used as the template for the rest of the European periphery, turning the majority of European states into what I jokingly refer to as Bailoutistan, was always going to backfire on the European economy. Tim Geithner and Jack Lew, his successor in the US Treasury Department, understood this well. They shared the concern that what started in Greece in 2010, with the combination of an absurd bailout and a hideous level of austerity, has put Europe into a position that undermines America's recovery and threatens the prospects of China, Latin America, even India and Africa. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

And so it turns out that all talk of gradual moves toward a political union and toward "more Europe" are not first steps toward a European democratic federation but, rather, and ominously, a leap into an iron cage that prolongs the crisis and wrecks any prospect of a genuine federal European democracy in the future. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

Few progressive Europeans would argue against a democratic United States of Europe, with a proper government elected on a pan-European ticket and answerable to a proper parliament vested with complete sovereignty over all decisions and matters. But this is pure wishful thinking. The sobering reality is that it is not in the European Union's DNA naturally to evolve into a federation. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

Germany is Europe's heart. But bitterness is widespread. Currently the Germans hate the Greeks and the Greeks hate the Germans. The demonization of the country has to stop if we want a strong Europe. So I am setting a positive example. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

Toxic derivatives were underpinned by toxic economics, which, in turn, were no more than motivated delusions in search of theoretical justification; fundamentalist tracts that acknowledged facts only when they could be accommodated to the demands of the lucrative faith. Despite their highly impressive labels and technical appearance, economic models were merely mathematized versions of the touching superstition that markets know best, both at times of tranquility and in periods of tumult. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

The euro is a hybrid of a fixed exchange-rate regime, like the 1980s ERM or the 1930s gold standard, and a state currency. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

ALEXIS DE TOQUEVILLE once wrote that those who praise freedom only for the material benefits it offers have never kept it long. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

But unlike Nevada, Ireland had to fend for itself when it came to propping up its banks and paying its unemployment benefits. Lacking a printing press, it had to go cap in hand to the money markets to borrow huge quantities of money that, in Nevada's case, had been paid for at the federal level. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

By year's end, on 31 December, the New York stock exchange has lost more than 31 per cent of its total value since 1 January 2008. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

The book is a key to open the human ~ Yanis Yingnan JI

All dynamic societies founded their success on two production processes that unfolded in parallel: the manufacturing of a surplus and the manufacturing of consent (regarding its distribution). ~ Yanis Varoufakis

The economic crisis has weakened the EU for years. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

Beneath the specific events that I experienced, I recognised a universal story – the story of what happens when human beings find themselves at the mercy of cruel circumstances that have been generated by an inhuman, mostly unseen network of power relations. This is why there are no 'goodies' or 'baddies' in this book. Instead, it is populated by people doing their best, as they understand it, under conditions not of their choosing. Each of the persons I encountered and write about in these pages believed they were acting appropriately, but, taken together, their acts produced misfortune on a continental scale. Is this not the stuff of authentic tragedy? Is this not what makes the tragedies of Sophocles and Shakespeare resonate with us today, hundreds of years after the events they relate became old news? ~ Yanis Varoufakis

In a move that will remain in Irish annals as a stigma comparable to the potato famine, the Dublin government succumbed to ECB blackmail: make the German creditors of Ireland's commercial banks whole, even a bank that was closed down and thus no longer systemically important for Ireland's financial sector, or else. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

Ironically, the rise of the Tea Party increased the interventions of the Fed that the movement denounced. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

I don't believe a Brexit will hurt the City of London as one of the largest financial centers in the world. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

We Greeks are the blacks of Europe. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

In the case of the Irish banks, the private bonds that they had purchased were uninsured. In the case of Greek state bonds, their buyers also knew that these were Greek law contracts, meaning that they could be given a haircut (written down) by a future stressed Greek government. This is precisely why the interest rates were higher than in Germany. Higher risk, higher rewards. As long as the gamble was paying off, the German bankers reaped benefits that they shared with no one. But when the gambles turned bad, as Irish banks and the Greek state failed, they demanded that the taxpayers of Greece and Ireland pay up, as if they had bought insurance from them. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

If the 'Athens Spring' - when the Greek people courageously rejected the catastrophic austerity conditions of the previous bailouts - has one lesson to teach, it is that Greece will recover only when the European Union makes the transition from 'We the states' to 'We the European people.' ~ Yanis Varoufakis

Bankruptocracy is as much a European predicament as it is an American 'invention.' The difference between the experience of the two continents is that at least Americans did not have to labour under the enormous design faults of the eurozone. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

Help other people ,help themselves ~ Yanis Yingnan JI

In brief, it is now clear that Europe's religious dedication to rules is nothing but a veil under which the strong make up the rules as they go along to suit their own political agenda. Perhaps that would be fine if the said agenda was not quick-marching Europe and the global economy into an economic, political and moral morass. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

When Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he famously replied that "it would be a very good idea. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

We will compromise and compromise and compromise but we will never be compromised. ~ Yanis Varoufakis