How Capitalism Fails The two June 2018 programs by TUC radio with the economist and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis drew such a huge response that we are following up with an extraordinary excerpt from a May 9, 2018, talk at the Cambridge Forum. In that talk Yanis Varoufakis makes the point that democracy and capitalism are incompatible. However capitalism also can’t maintain itself – he says – it is a self devouring system. And he invites us today to resolve the question of who is going to survive, democracy or the global financial system.
In this excerpt of his near two hour talk Varoufakis traces the origins of the current economic crisis from 1929 through the New Deal through WWII through Bretton Woods to 2008 and beyond.
Varoufakis is weaving in illuminating historic facts such as why bankers were not allowed to participate in the drafting of Bretton Woods, how the Marshall Plan saved the US economy, how Bretton Woods collapsed in the 1970s, and why and how bankers became instrumental in rescuing the US from collapse after the US bankrupted itself by going on a global shopping spree – and why we need a new New Deal.
Yanis Varoufakis was already an internationally known economist and academic when he was elected to the Greek parliament as a member of the Syriza party. At the height of the Greek debt crisis he served as Minister of Finance in 2015. He resigned in protest over the imposition of structural adjustment and bailout loans on the Greek people.
Varoufakis had been invited to the US to talk about his most recent book: Talking to My Daughter About the Economy. Among his other books are: Adults in the Room, And the Weak Suffer What They Must?, and The Global Minotaur, America, the True Causes of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy.
Yanis Varoufakis is a cofounder of an international grassroots movement, DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement 2025). After teaching for many years in the United States, Great Britain, and Australia, he is currently a professor of economics at the University of Athens.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:01 — 19.9MB)
