Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Former Greek Finance Minister: Mistakes Were Made

 “We made mistakes, there’s no doubt about that,” Yanis Varoufakis told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in his first international TV interview since stepping down earlier this month as the Greek finance minister.

“And I hold myself responsible for a number of them.But the truth of the matter, Christiane, is that the very powerful troika of creditors were not interested in coming a sensible, honorable, mutually beneficial agreement,” he said.

“I think that close inspection is going to reveal the truth of what I am saying: They were far more interested in humiliating this government and overthrowing it, or at least making sure that it overthrows itself in terms of its policies, than they were interested in an agreement that would for instance ensure that they would get most of their money back.”

What Varoufakis says here is largely correct, but the mistakes made by him and other Greek officials were tsunami like.

They simply had no Plan B, which would have been to tell the international banksters to go to hell, default on the debt and return to the drachma. Indeed, I would argue that this should have been Plan A.

But Greek officials put themselves in a position of having to negotiate with the banksters, without an alternative. As I said very early on, if I was a Greek official involved in attempting to deal with the banksters, I would have had drachma printed up and ensured that pictures got in the newspapers, and online, of couriers delivering the drachma to bank branches "just in case."

Without that threat, the banksters knew they held all the cards and the  rape of the Greek citizens final deal reflects that.

-RW 

4 comments:

  1. This is what you get when you elect leftist activists with no real-world experience to positions of power. Sound familiar?

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  2. Print drachma. Wenzel are you advocating fiat money? What about the denationalization of money? You sound like a statist.

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  3. If the Greek people get fed up enough, they will change the government.

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  4. RW - Yanis knew what you are saying - so the question is why did he place Greece in a destructive position.

    Two links:

    http://journal-neo.org/2015/07/03/what-stinks-about-varoufakis-and-the-whole-greek-mess/

    This could have stabilized Greece:

    http://greece.greekreporter.com/2015/06/27/greek-investigators-report-finds-evidence-of-plot-against-former-pms-life-silver-drachma-plan/

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