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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.
I don't know how to feel about this one...
EU trading cards to the rescue!
...is farm more gold. That'll solve all of our economic woes!
Finance Minister of Greece ranks pretty high on my list of "you could pay me enough, but it would be A LOT" jobs.
If he's working on "Valve's time", then he'll produce the first draft about possible solutions around 10 years after Greece has ceased to exist as a country.
and transitions to a diversified, hat-based economy.
I don't really want to compare Yanis to a gambling murderer, but I am anyways. This sounds a bit too much like John Law getting appointed to fix the French Economy. That turned out great for everyone didn't it. Appointing someone to run your economy who's primary job in economics was to make a bunch of gambling addicts to improve steams revenue doesn't sound like the kind of person who should be fixing an economy. But who knows, maybe he'll do something good and be crowned a genius.
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.
What can possibly go wrong?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
They're already past the "make things worse" stage. That's what austerity brought.
Shit's hitting the fan and that's why the radicals are showing up
The fact that he is atheist has nothing to do with the story. Why mention it?
And hats, hats, as far as the eye can see!
There'd be precedent for that in the European Union. England had a law in effect from 1571 through 1597 to make failure to wear a British-made wool cap in public a crime.
Wrong, the austerity measures implemented a dependency on living outside the means of the country, without the ability to devalue their currency in a controlled fashion like Iceland did, this makes recovery not possible. You don't get a man out of debt by lending more money to him and forcing him to accept it while following specific terms on how to make use of it.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Shutting down the insolvent banks only solves the bank problems. It doesn't solve the country's and, as you rightly point out, the banks should not be that tied to the country policy.
In many ways, making the banks insolvent is a death warrant to future credit and investment. Who's going to start a bank in Greece now? And who's going to bail out Greece when they can't afford healthcare any more, get invaded, etc.?
The problem is bigger than the banks, hence focusing on the banks is erroneous. What they've done, however, is thrown out all the measures demanded by other countries and banks that would have saved them money enough to be solvent again some day. And tied those measures in with "greedy bankers". By throwing out the austerity measures, you've basically said "We don't care about saving money or what we spend on things we don't need", and that further destroys your credit as it stinks of mismanagement.
And, ultimately, a lot of these promises they won't be able to fulfil. What they are saying is that they'll default on loans, remove the money-saving measures already implemented and then SOMEHOW get back in the black. Nobody's quite worked out the somehow.
It's like a bankrupt telling you they'll go bankrupt, but keep drinking and gambling as before, and somehow they'll get back in the black if only those damn debtors would go away and stop helping them pay their debt off in easy monthly payments.
My knowledge of Greek economics doesn't go much beyond NPR, but the changes needed seem pretty straightforward:
1. Reform civil service
2. Aggressively prosecute tax fraud
3. Tax church assessts (i.e. church either make is assets poductive or sells them to someone who will)
An angry coalition leftists and iconoclasts might be pretty good at 2 of these things. Maybe all 3?
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.
No, I don't. I mean do exactly what Iceland did, where a slow, controlled printing of money was used to devalue themselves to match their economic strength. None of this requires defaulting on it's debts.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Yeah, capitalism ends when bankers run out of the other people money to bail them out.
My suggestion from 2008 when Greece ran out of tear gas: https://groups.google.com/foru... :-), no obvious external enemies declaring war, and so on. And they are so worried about their future ability to make and use things (which is how I translate "fears for Greece's economic future") that they are running out of tear gas? This all makes no *physical* sense. The place should be a paradise. Instead it is in "self-destruct mode" according to one editor. It must be *ideology*. Or, more correctly, ideology *embodied* in a certain type of productive infrastructure. ... :-) Instead, we have a system in the middle that produces some variety at a huge expense of human effort taken away from family and civic duties, and it is a system now with so many questions about its uncertain future (including that anyone who is young will have a dignified place in the economic scheme of things) that an entire country has just run out of tear gas. This makes no sense (except of course, that some people do benefit from this, like tear gas manufacturers, school teachers who get paid to keep kids off the streets preparing them for non-existent jobs, people who are near the top of the economic hierarchy already and feel secure, etc.). :-) But, no need to move with the internet really. Maybe somebody on the list could coordinate moving the rioters off th
"Now, does this make any sense if you understand the possibilities of open manufacturing or an open society? In Greece you have a warm climate, access to oceans, lots of sun and wind, an educated populace with a 2000+ year history of democracy (on and off
So, ironically, we have the worst of both systems. We could have a really centralized system run efficiently with a tiny fraction of the workforce now, with a lot less variety perhaps (that is, all the old Soviet Central Planning stuff would work now that we have the internet and great software and great designs and great computers if we accept some voluntary simplicity), but with everything very cheap (essentially, just given away) and 99% of the population doing whatever they wanted with their time. Or, we could have a freewheeling diverse gift economy of local open manufacturing where people just make whatever they want in an open way, with all sorts of useful and useless items. (Aspects of the two extremes may even converge, since what are the 99% of people going to do with the generic stuff but customize it?
Anyway, this suggests one target of open manufacturing could be a community of size ranging from Iceland (about 300,000 people) to Greece (about 11,000,000 people). That's certainly an interesting size range. I would think 99% closure of those economies by mass should be easily doable. Computer chips, some medicines, and maybe some other specialized components might be the major imports after the system was set up. Note that while one may not expect Greece or Iceland to "self-replicate" any time soon, the ability do do so ensures it can be self-repairing.
Anyway, it kind of comes down to how much economic security is worth to a country compared to minimum effort. Given the massive youth unemployment in Greece, and the economic fears of depending on a global economy, it would seem like maximizing productive efficiency through participating in global production would not be at the top of their priority list now that they are out of tear gas. Unfortunately, they did not invest in this research ten years ago. So, this is only theoretical at this point. It might take a very expensive crash program to bring together thousands of researchers for a year to make headway in any time that might make a difference. Still, politically, that is an out for Greece. We could all move there, recruit all the educated youths off the streets, and spend a year figuring out how to make Greece work for everybody and be 99% self-sufficient by mass.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.