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Valve's Economist Yanis Varoufakis Appointed Greece's Finance Minister
eldavojohn writes A turnover in the Greek government resulted from recent snap elections placing SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical Left) in power — just shy of an outright majority by two seats. Atheist, and youngest Prime Minister in Greek history since 1865, Alexis Tsipras has been appointed the new prime minister and begun taking immediate drastic steps against the recent austerity laws put in place by prior administrations. One such step has been to appoint Valve's economist Yanis Varoufakis to position of Finance Minister of Greece. For the past three years Varoufakis has been working at Steam to analyze and improve the Steam Market but now has the opportunity to improve one of the most troubled economies in the world.
He basically wants Eurozone banks to have a single rescue fund, for the ECB to issue bonds, and the EIB to invest into the periphery economies to get out of the crisis.
There's just one problem. Even if they make sense none of those things can be done by Greece alone. I hope he has a Plan B.
You can see him explain his views on the current economic crisis in this video.
I know it's fashionable to jump on the Valve-hating-bandwagon, but would it be too much of an effort to, you know, not follow the flock and use some common sense instead? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... lists a lot of reasons for why he seems like a good person for this, like e.g. the following exerpt on his academic career:
After training in mathematics and statistics, Varoufakis received his economics doctorate in 1987 at the University of Essex. Before that he had already begun teaching economics and econometrics at the University of Essex and the University of East Anglia. In 1988 he spent a year as a Fellow at the University of Cambridge. From 1989 until 2000 he taught as Senior Lecturer in Economics at the Department of Economics of the University of Sydney. In 2000 he moved to his native Greece where he is still Professor of Economic Theory at the University of Athens (currently on leave). In 2002 Varoufakis established The University of Athens Doctoral Program in Economics (UADPhilEcon), which he directed until 2008. Since January 2013 he has been teaching at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.
This guy has written several books, he appears as guest analyst for news media like the BBC, CNN, Sky News, Russia Today and Bloomberg TV and he seems to be quite well-respected everywhere. But no, you just focus on the fact that he also happens to work for Valve.
Preferably in a foreign currency, right?
FYI, there is no "national currency" in Greece, anything is paid in Euro.
Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.
That's because game economies are like real economies in many ways and they know that economies collapse when you have austerity...when too little new money is created.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Don't be mislead by the debt problem. If Greece had economic growth, it would not have a debt problem.
Greece rankes "mostly unfree" on the Index of Economic Freedom:
By the way, regarding "austerity", Greece's public expenditures equal 58.5 percent of domestic output. That does not sound very austere to me.