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181 " John Kenneth Galbraith: ‘There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose. "
― Yanis Varoufakis , Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe's Deep Establishment
182 " The reason Greece became the first eurozone country to go manifestly bankrupt was simple enough. From the moment it looked likely that the drachma was history and Greece’s place in the euro was safe, bankers like Franz went into a frenzy of lending for the reason he explained to me so eloquently as we were flying to New York. "
― Yanis Varoufakis , And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future
183 " A cynical ploy that transferred hundreds of billions of losses from the books of the French and German banks to Europe’s taxpayers was presented to the world as the manifestation of European solidarity. What makes this transfer sinister, rather than just cynical, was that the Greek loan came not only from French and German taxpayers but also from the Portuguese, the Slovaks, the Irish taxpayers—from countries whose banks had nothing to gain. In essence, the private losses of French and German banks were spread around throughout the eurozone, forcing even the weakest citizens of the weakest of member-states to chip in. "
184 " It is not at all an exaggeration to suggest that the Third World debt crisis was the colonized world’s second historic disaster (after the brutal experience of colonization and the associated slave trade). In fact, it was a disaster from which most Third World countries have never quite recovered. "
― Yanis Varoufakis , The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy
185 " German officials knew it in 1964, as they knew it in 1992: for the French elites, a common currency with Germany was an attempt to neuter Germany, indeed to conquer the Bundesbank without firing a single shot. German decision makers, especially Bundesbank officials, would never allow themselves to forget that. But "
186 " Unlike those corporations that focused on building a particular brand (e.g. Coca-Cola or Marlboro), or companies that created a wholly new sector by means of some invention (e.g. Edison with the light bulb, Microsoft with its Windows software, Sony with the Walkman, or Apple with the iPod/iPhone/iTunes package), Walmart did something no one had ever thought of before: it packaged a new ideology of cheapness into a brand that was meant to appeal to the financially stressed American working and lower-middle classes. "
187 " If this sounds like a Ponzi scheme it is because it is the mother of all Ponzi schemes. A merry-go-round of Ponzi austerity which, interestingly, left both the insolvent banks and the insolvent Greek state a little more insolvent while, all along, the Greek population was sinking deeper and deeper into despair. And all so the European Union could pretend that its inane rules had been respected. "
188 " The first sin, which took the form of a mathematized rhetoric, lulled authorities and academics into a false belief that financial innovation had engineered risk out of the system; that the new instruments allowed a new form of debt with the properties of quicksilver. Once loans were originated, they were then sliced up into tiny pieces, blended together in packages that contained different degrees of risk,3 and sold all over the globe. By thus "
189 " When inordinate weight is loaded onto a flimsily constructed bridge, the weakest beam will break first. "
190 " After the press conference I would return to an empty sixth floor to engage in battle with the world’s most powerful creditors without secretaries, staff or indeed a computer. Thankfully, I had my trusty laptop in my rucksack. But who would furnish me with the Wi-Fi password? "
191 " In other words, the uninsured private bankers had to be bailed out illegally and utterly unethically. But the taxpayers who were forced to carry that can should not even be given better terms for repaying the odious, private debt they were forced to acquire in order to bail the bankers out. "
192 " Most ordinary politicians would have given a terse statement, taken a couple of questions and headed for the steam room in their hotel. Instead Varoufakis conducted a 40-minute Q&A hailing the deal as a minor victory "
193 " I was beginning to gain a degree of notoriety in the Greek and international media as a doomsayer who believed that not only was Greece’s bankruptcy inevitable but that it was a precursor of the euro-zone’s unravelling as well. Only "