What does it mean to behave like adults in the current capitalist system? Isn't the stock market a board for fickle kids who only think about making more and more money and reaching the finish line first?
The point is that there is no other choice but to play. And although the rules sometimes seem improvised, other times unfair and always debatable, there is no other choice but to assume that the world is a board of children playing with the destiny of the world. One of the few who tried to prevent countries from being pieces to play with knows a lot about all this game: Yanis Varoufakis.
Book Summary: During the spring of 2015, negotiations to renew bailout programs between the newly elected Greek government of Syriza (the radical left party) and the Troika were going through such a difficult and confusing time that, at a time of In exasperation, Christine Lagarde, the director of the International Monetary Fund, called on both of them to behave like adults.
Part of the confusion was due to the appearance on the scene of someone who was trying to change the way of analyzing the debt crisis in Greece: it was Yanis Varoufakis, its finance minister, an economist with iconoclastic ideas who walked through the European chancelleries with a leather jacket and no tie. The message that Varoufakis communicated to the institutions that negotiated with Greece was clear: the debt accumulated by his country was unpayable and it would be even more so if the austerity demanded by its creditors continued to be implemented. There was no use racking up one bailout after another with more cuts and tax hikes.
What Greece had to do was more radical and went through altering the economic ideas of the European establishment. In this fast and fascinating chronicle, Varoufakis demonstrates his talent as a storyteller and exposes his encounters and disagreements with the European protagonists of the financial crisis, in the endless meetings that took place during those months. With an unusual harshness, but also with a critical recognition of the errors of the Greek government and his own, he shows the functioning of the European institutions and their negotiation dynamics, and finally the Greek surrender that occurs after his departure from the government.
You can buy now Behave like adults, the book by Yanis Varoufakis, here: