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Comment by atmosx | Hacker News Reader

Here are the thoughts of Steve Keen (an economist) about Varoufakis[1] on BBC and this how the BBC, the economist and largely every other mainstream media outlet describes Varoufakis[2]. I saw since day-1 Varoufakis described as "self-acclaimed marxist left wing/radical finance minister". A description which in the western has more than a touch of negativity. On the other side you see e.g. Jeroen Dijsselbloem[3] being presented as "President of the Eurogroup" and/or "President of the ESM", while he could be easily be described in the same vein as a "Right-right wing, non-economist with a false degree[4]". Unfortunately that's the level of journalism we are up against.

Greece apart, if one takes the time to listen Varoufakis talking, then he understands that he is an exceptionally knowledgeable man. He has a deep knowledge of his domain and he speaks his mind - which is rare for a politician and got him in to troubles with the media more than once - all to often and in a very loud and clear manner.

I'm not sure if can pull out anything positive for Greece, because other than bailing Greece out, there is no way (for the Greeks at least) out of this spiral: Following the EUs terms is equally if not (much?) more catastrophic than leaving the common currency (even without leaving the EuroZone for military/geopolitical reasons).

[1] http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2015/02/05/talking-about-...

[2] http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/02/bill-black-bbc-dismis...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeroen_Dijsselbloem

[4] http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/dutch-finance-minister-...

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Have you read Pettis on the subject? Similar views on prospects - there has to be a bailout, but his view is that there is a bailout - somehow or other someone will pay the debt, European taxpayers probably, but we can have a managed fair debt reallocation or we can have a disastrous collapse.

My fear is unelected officials trying to smack down democratically elected wishes will lead to a collapse not just in Greece but elsewhere.

    unelected officials trying to smack down democratically elected wishes

Greece can immediately get rid of EU and IMF officials if they want. All they need to do if forgot the free money that has been raining down on Greece.

"forgot the free money that has been raining down on Greece"

Which greece never sees, and the money go immediately to bailing out the german and french banks that created the problem in the first place. (Courtesy of the tax payers, with a cut for the politicians, with the past gains of german and french industialists, and the present and future gains of the bailed out banks.)

Let's assume John goes to a Ferrari shop and can't afford the latest California T model because it's to expensive. John borrows the money from Tom and gets the car, promising Tom to pay back. John then doesn't deliver on his promise, and starts to whine ... please EU I'm so poor, please bail me out. The EU then pays John's debt.

Then "twobits" would say "Which John never sees, and the money go immediately to bailing Tom who created the problem in the first place."

So, what has EU done in the example of "NotableAlamode"? EU has made sure Tom gets his money back, despite the fact that he had recklessly lent money to John to get high interest rates -which John had been providing all along till the Ferarri case. And John's debt is not only the same, but much higher, because EU has forced him to sell off 25% of his property that was providing him money (be that human capital or state assets). So, Tom (EU banks) is bailed out and John (Greece) can never pay back his debt.

> unelected officials trying to smack down democratically elected wishes

Didn't it come to your mind that it's first of all the voters of other EU countries that don't want to pay for Greece's debt with their taxes? It's not the unelected officials' money we're talking about here.

You mean, they want the greeks to pay for their (mostly french and german) bankers poor investments?

Greece took 240 billion euros from the other EU governments as a bailout. That is other citizen's money, not "bad bankers'" money.

They took them on the express condition that the vast majority was used to pay the bankers. So the former greek government was the willing participant in moving bankers losses onto public books.

But that makes it no less the bankers losses that were covered with public money.

Is Greece willing to say that it does not back decisions and agreements made by the previous government? How can anyone trust they won't do the same when this government bows out? Greece will lose all credibility in the international market if it keeps playing victim.

No, the debts will not go away. Everyone loves to crap on big banks but in this case Greece owes money to EU nations.

Unrelated side note: Bringing up the second world war makes Greece sound even more petty. What's wrong with you people?

> Greece owes money to EU nations

Only because the private debts were nationalized in the last bailout round, which was basically a joint bailout of Greece's public finances and German/French banks, all of which were on the brink of insolvency. The bonds were previously mostly held by French and German banks, and the agreement did two things: 1) Greece was given a big chunk of money on the condition that most of it be sent back north to pay off a portion of their bonds; and 2) much of the remaining bad debt was shifted to public books, in the process being restructured with more generous terms. Greece has a large part of the fault in this whole saga, but they are not the only reason these originally privately held debts have now ended up on public books.

I do think from a realpolitik perspective Greece is playing hardball at the wrong time: they had a much stronger negotiating position in 2010 than they do now, when much of the "contagion" problem has been contained. But the government at the time stupidly agreed to a set of terms that solved the German/French problem while containing but not solving the Greek problem. Few serious economists at the time believed the package was a workable one for Greece, unless you thought some extremely optimistic projects of Greek GDP growth were realistic; it was seen as at best kicking the can down the road. But by 2015 when Greeks realized that and voted in a government willing to play hardball, they are no longer in a good negotiating position.

I don't think Greece is playing hardball. I think the game is "chicken": everybody involved knows that Greece cannot and will not pay back that money and will leave the Euro. But both sides want to avoid being the first mover: both want the other side to make the first move and admit that Greece is bankrupt.

Syriza wants to be forced out of the Euro so they can continue to play the xenophobic game and blame Europe, or rather Germany. The rest of the EU wants Greece to decide to leave, so they don't have to go to their voters and say "we tried everything, they didn't want help ..." and avoid admitting that the critics of the bailout were right all along.

In this game, time is on Greece's side, because as long as nobody blinks, all that sweet EU money is still raining down on Athens.

There are many layers here, as I see it sitting in a northern european non-eurozone country:

Moving bankers bad investments onto public books is a monumentally poor decision for everyone, and the effects of the decision should be undone.

However, if France and Germany have no appetite for holding their bankers responsible for their poor investments, and if they can honestly convince their citizens to pay for the bankers poor investments, then that is a (poor) decision they can make (and have so far made). The better decision is to require repayment of bonusses, let the losses materially affect banks shareprices, and let bank-shareholders lawsuits handle the rest.

On the other side, pushing the financial burden of a bankers bailout onto the greeks is counterproductive to everyone (who is not a banker) in the eurozone, and is morally disgusting.

Are you not in effect saying: never pay back debt at all? For whenever you don't pay back debt, then it's the lender's fault, nobody forced them to lend, it's their own risk.

While this is a consistent position that has historically been held by some, it's incompatible with any modern economy. In particular it is incompatible with the modern concepts of old-age pension, health insurance, unemployment insurance etc.

No - as a citizen I'm saying. Don't let bankers buy risky papers to a degree that they cannot cover their own losses.

The german and french bankers should not have bought greek government bonds at the prices they did considering the greek levels of public debt.

Why do you keep talking about German and French banks only? As Atropos pointed out, Greek banks had the highest exposure. German banks had quite a low exposure. In the light of this (and the power structure of the EU/ECB) the German taxpayer is bailing out French and Greek banks.

Anyway, what is deemed risky is highly subjective and easy to see only in hindsight.

Because democratically, the foreign debt-relation makes the whole difference. If all of the greek debt had been domestic, then a restructuring would have been a purely domestic matter - solvable by a democratic election.

What is ugly is when foreign states impose non-sensical demands of another country as part of a move to bail out their own banks.

I'm not sure I see your point. Greece has a perfectly democratic way of getting rid of its debt: default. Russia in 1998 was the last big European country to do so. Iceland's banks also defaulted on some wholesale depositors a few years ago. Greece has (partly or fully) defaulted on foreign debt already on several occasions in the past. Greece has in effect already defaulted on some of its current debt, although it is not always called a default. Moreover Greece is getting extremely favourable interest rates and repayment schedules on its remaining debt.

The real question is: why is Greece not going the democratic way of defaulting on its external debt? And the answer is, as you know well, that Greece wants to continue receiving all that sweet EU money. Why stop a good thing?

    ... impose non-sensical demands ...

Have you considered that not everybody thinks that fighting corruption, tax-avoidance etc is non-sensical?

Agreed. However, once again, we should not compare directly solutions of Iceland (banks) and Greece (government), because the problems are quite different.

Iceland (the country, the government) was not in much debt and did not default. Icelandic banks did default and went bankrupt. The banks (Kaupthing, Glitnir and Landsbank) were split so that Icelandic debts and assets were moved into new surviving publicly owned domestic versions of the banks, and the foreign remnants of the banks were placed into receivership and liquidation.

Russia, the country, actually defaulted. Russia is today not known as a safe place for investments (though the history of a default is just a small part there; in Russia's assets, it has huge energy reserves, and in its liabilities, it has kleptocracy, corruption and an arbitrary justice system).

Sure, but it's a tried and tested way of getting rid of one's debt. Many (most?) countries have used it in the past, see [1], including the USA.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_default#List_of_sove...

"Moving bankers bad investments onto public books is a monumentally poor decision for everyone"

It's a great decision for the banks, and the politicians that got their cut. It's (only) a bad decision for you and me, the tax payers, who are being raped.

You are using the anti-bailout and anti-banker rhetoric from the bailouts in the financial crisis, but this situation here is totally different: Greece borrows 100€ from a bank, cannot repay it, so there is a huge debt haircut and Greece only has to repay 50€. Now an argument can be made that the haircut should have been even bigger, but there was no shifting of "bankers losses onto public books".

You can make the argument that the other EU countries taxpayers had to cover Greek debt to banks (including Greek banks) with their own taxpayer money - but that is something that only the other EU countries could complain about!

Hmm, you do realise that when you say "Greece borrows 100 EUR from a bank ... " you actually mean, "bankers bid competitively for greek government bonds - and were so eager to buy them that the spreads to german bonds were ridiculously low 2000 to 2008".

And there was very clearly a shifting of "bankers losses onto public books" when Greece was pushed to repurchase bonds from banks at values far above their market value with money lent to Greece for that express purpose.

And yes I think that we exactly agree that other countries could cover the losses that the banks incurred on their bad investments in greek bonds. But I, very clearly, think that the other countries should not cover those losses on bad investments, but rather demand payback of bonuses paid 2000-2008 to anyone responsible for the greek government bond investments.

Sometimes using fewer words enhances clarity. Country A has debts of 100 Euro. The debt gets restructured by 50% so that Country A now only has debts of 50 Euros. How has this transaction magically pushed losses onto public books of Country A?

It pushed them onto the public books of countries B, C, D, E, F, G, etc, who took over (part of) the debt. Since they also provide financing at lower than market rate, they are also providing a continuous subsidy to country A (in a manner that they hope their own voters/tax payers won't notice -- and in a manner that the entitled voters of country A certainly haven't noticed).

(I wrote "part of" because there was a haircut involved for the private lenders. They /did/ take a loss.)

Edit: tpyo.

Banks have (eagerly) bought bonds for 100 EUR from Country A (that considering the risk inherent in the high public levels of debt of country, clearly were not worth more than 30-40 EUR).

Now there is a crisis, and the unsustainability of the public debt of country A is undeniable to everyone, so no-one will buy the bonds, well maybe for 5 EUR. However, through lobbying etc. a deal is struck so that Country B lends Country A 60 EUR to buy the bonds for the artificially high price of 53 EUR, thereby allowing the banks to escape the full writedown from 100 EUR to 5 EUR, but pushing 48 EUR of unrealized bankers loss onto the public books of Country A (debtor) and Country B (creditor).

I'm sorry, but this is a ridiculous way to think! You give me 100 Euros that I promise to repay later. When "later" comes, I refuse to pay. My brother finds this humiliating and to protect the family name buys the debt from you for 10 Euros. Should I now be able to say to him "Hey, a smart hedge fund would have only paid 1 Euro for this debt - you pushed 9 Euros of book losses on me, that I had nothing to do with! I'm getting taken advantage only to save the family name!"

Nevermind the theoretical principles involved, the actual numbers are quite different from what you probably believe: All in all, around 200 Billion Euros of private creditor debt was restructured:

1) 107 Billion Euros were simply written off

2) 62,4 Billion Euros of old private bonds were exchanged into new private bonds

3) Only 29,7 Billion Euros were paid out to private creditors and shifted onto the books of other Eurozone governments.

I am sorry that you think it is ridiculous. However, it is the only reasonable way to think about bonds. They are not safer than a risk of default, and the spread between bonds expresses exactly this (relatively). If bankers buy at a high price (low spread) when clearly they should not have bought at that price they are simply poor investors. No one forced them to buy - they could, and should, have bought something else.

I don't see we disagree about the numbers? Of the 200 Billion, only about half of the losses were realized. The rest was pushed onto public books (as new bonds or as bailout-loans).

Do you think that if Greece had defaulted on those loans they would have been better off today? Are you aware that that situation would have meant MUCH bigger cuts to public spending than those requested from the so called Troika?

> Do you think that if Greece had defaulted on those loans they would have been better off today?

Yes.

> Are you aware that that situation would have meant MUCH bigger cuts to public spending than those requested from the so called Troika?

No, I am not, that's because this scenario is nothing but fear-mongering without any base in reality. It is always put up when an alternative to the current course is discussed but is nothing but hot air. If you are "aware" that your scenario would have happened provide a proof.

It's not fear-mongering, it's just looking at historical precedents (eg Argentina). Do you think you can just default, and then everybody will do business with you as usual? Do you think that Greek bonds were only in stupid French and German banks, or that they were the main investment of Greek banks - which would have all defaulted, leaving Greek people and businesses without any money, and forcing the government to leave the Euro (as to be able to start printing money).

There is no mathematical proof for what I'm saying, but even the economists who suggested that Greece should have defaulted and left the euro were saying (I would say they were aware) that things would have become much worse before they became better.

That is as certain an economic forecast as one can be - the point some economists were/are making is that in the long run Greece will come out better from a fresh start with a default and outside the euro, with a devalued Dracma that would make Greeks poorer but more competitive internationally. But there is no guarantee that Greece would actually recover from an event like that and come back to the first world - especially if it alienates the whole EU in the process.

A default would not just lower the Greek wages down to where they ought to be. It would also de facto quickly lead to massive deregulation, reductions in the number of people working for the state, subsidies for political cronies, etc. It might also break various political stalemates.

All those factors will help Greece rebuild but it is a very unpleasant way of reforming a country that has had an urgent need for reforms for decades. Unpleasant as in: people will die.

A smarter country with better voters would grab the chance it has been given to do those reforms in a slower and more orderly fashion and say "Thank You!" to the IMF and the EU. And then spend the next 30 years apologizing :)

So after default, where would the money have come from to pay teachers and police salaries, pensions, public services, etc? And how would the country import oil, medicine, technology, etc?

Even if current Greek debt was wiped out overnight, the government would still need loans just to pay day-to-day bills. It's hard to tell how much since lying about government spending is a Greek institution (for example, they've "revised" the 2009 deficit number 3/4 times since then) but conservatively a few billion a month would be required even if they had no debt.

The unfairly vilified troika not only gave Greece the money to pay off all their loans at very reasonable rates but also promised to continue to lend money to give Greece some time to sort out their primary deficit (deficit without interest payments). No Syriza is telling the rest of the EU that they will reverse the moves to fix the primary deficit but that the EU must continue to pay for it.

And Greece actually sorted out that primary deficit for a moment, in second half of 2013. Then, in 2014, the election campaigning started again.

Greece DID default on privately held loans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_sector_involvement

AFAIK that wasn't technically a default.

Edit: yes it was a partial default, so what I meant is defined as "disorderly default".

No. Greece got money from german and french banks. (Like giving all your money to an old, sick, homeless, uneducated, drug addicted, person. Would you do it?) That, turned out great for the german and french industrialists. Greeks had "free money", and more BMWs were sold. But, suprisingly, didn't turn out good for the banks. So, the politicians, appreciating their cuts, transfered the debts to their taxpayers, all over europe, to "save greece". End result: Industrialists, happy. Banks, happy. Politicians, happy. The tax payers, pays (much, much, much) more.

Oh God what a perfect conspiracy! But it's not at all as simple as that. The most important thing to remember is that "too big to fail" is morally very bad, but it doesn't mean it's not true. If Greece had been allowed do default when the crisis hit hardest, very likely speculators would have attacked also Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland, and possibly the whole EU would have gone to pieces, with MUCH worse consequences for all EU citizens - and the whole World, actually.

Actually, the highest investment in Greek government bonds was by Greek banks, see "The Greek Debt Restructuring: An Autopsy" by Zettelmeyer/Trebesch/Gulati.

This narrative of "bankers" (biehl, just look up how many times you repeat the word) is apparently popular somewhere, because it enables you to find a group of scapegoats who can be blamed for problems, a group about which someone can say "take their money, no one will suffer".

But it is not so simple. What is borrowed to Greece is not "bankers'" own money. It is funds belonging to institutional investors. The job of those "bankers" is to look after that money and invest it. Significant institutions include things like pension funds or other savers.

Write off the debt, who loses? It's not just some "banker"; the brunt will be carried by pension savers.

The money was lent to improve the Greek economy. It was largely spent on an unnecessarily large army, a large, inefficient and extremely well remunerated civil service, olympic games, cushy early retirement deals and shenanigans like that.

A fairly large amount (though still outweighed by other issues) was just outright stolen as well. Not many Greeks were too surprised to discover corruption, but the amounts have surprised many people. I think it was widely believed that officials were pocketing "modest" amounts of money (€100k here, €150k there), but some turned out to have been pocketing Swiss-bank-account sized amounts of money, tens of millions. A number of the arms deals appear to have been corrupted as well, e.g. both Russia's Almaz-Antey, and Germany's Rheinmetall, appear to have paid large amounts in bribes, presumably to divert even larger amounts of contracts. And the Olympics construction contracts were almost certainly not clean.

One thing that gained Syriza some centrist votes is that they come across as at least having clean hands: good or bad policies, people believe they aren't caught up in clientelist networks and stealing millions personally. Whereas the previous ND/Pasok unity government was widely suspected of still trying to cover up skeletons in its closet (e.g. the scandal over trying to suppress the Lagarde list didn't improve its image).

Yes, the "clean hands" thing is true, and it's about the only positive that Syriza has to offer.

You mean, the Greeks want Northern/Eastern Europe to pay for Greek vote buying?

Nope. I mean Our Eurozone growth model, [...] relied heavily on private, bank-driven, vendor-financing for the net exports of the surplus nations. [...]. The end result was a transfer of potential losses from the banks’ books onto Europe’s taxpayers in a manner that placed most of the burden of adjustment on the crisis countries that could least bear it.

http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2015/03/15/presenting-an-agenda-fo...

The money was already gone when we allowed bankers to handle it and invest it in high-risk projects like greek and spanish real-estate etc.

And if we don't place the blame where it is due (with the bankers) then they will find another bubble to waste our money with another time.

[edit: reply moved to proper place]

Why "Nothern/Eastern" Europe? Italy for example contributed 40 billion of the 240 billions that were used for the bailout so far.

Very good question.

Mostly because Italy (and France) itself is in danger. Do we think the money really is there if it is needed? And that it won't push Italy (and France) over the brink?

I just don't like bundling the "north" vs "south" of the EU.

Yes Italy and Spain were in dangerous waters if you looked at the interest rate differentials with Germany, but they paid their quota of the bailout like everybody else - so they saved Greece as much as everybody else. Actually, they contributed much more than the new North-Eastern EU states, which have a much lower GDP (both total and per capita).

But there is a very real North/South divide in the way the economies are structured and in societal norms (trust in others, corruption, tax evasion, clientelism). The PIIGS acronym wasn't conjured out of free air (Ireland seems over the worst, so we are down to PIGS now).

Doesn't it piss you off, btw, that Eastern European countries with a poorer population than Greece participated in the Greek bailout but the Greeks still think they are entitled to more?

Are you trying to tell me that countries from the former Soviet block are corruption free? In my own experience they are much more corrupted than Italy; there is no correlation between corruption and latitude.

Regarding entitlement from some Greeks, I agree. But you should keep in mind the total net from/to the EU: all those poorer countries, even with the bailout, are getting much more from the EU than they are giving (as it should be).

> Are you trying to tell me that countries from the former Soviet block are corruption free?

I don't see him saying that. I see him saying that countries of the former Soviet block have poorer population than Greece [0] but are subsidizing it.

Also as nations they are poorer, though their GDP has climbed to the same level. They soon will be richer than Greece. In 1990, they were still much poorer, as they were still under Soviet occupation and influence, while Greece had been a member of EEC/EC for ten years. Greece is lagging behind due to its sclerotic economy and clientelism of previous power parties, and Syriza seems to revert to the same.

[0] http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=BLI

I quote:

> But there is a very real North/South divide in the way the economies are structured and in societal norms (trust in others, corruption, tax evasion, clientelism)

This is very poor simplifcation, and pretty offensive too.

It might be offensive, but is it untrue? Note that we're not saying things about people as individuals. We're talking about national cultures, stereotypes and statistical averages.

"Where trust is high, crime and corruption are low". http://www.pewglobal.org/2008/04/15/where-trust-is-high-crim...

Regarding trust, below is one source for how people see it. Look at the European map. There's a bit of north/south divide (with Italy being somewhat north). http://www.jdsurvey.net/jds/jdsurveyActualidad.jsp?Idioma=I&...

This is not the same as amount of corruption (note how high China and Saudi Arabia are in the "most people can be trusted" index, while they don't rate as well in corruption indexes). Here's the Transparency's Corruption index map: https://www.transparency.org/cpi2014/results

Crime maps are many but what I can find quickly are not incompatible with this generalisation either: http://www.numbeo.com/crime/gmaps_rankings_country.jsp

> We're talking about national cultures, stereotypes and statistical averages.

Exactly, stereotypes... and no, they're not true. I live in Italy and know Russia well enough, and Russia is much more corrupted than Italy. How much northern than Russia can you go?

Cultural problem? Yes. Latitude-related problem? No. Linking this to latitude is like linking problems to the color of your skin: you can't change the color of your skin, nor your latitude. Culture, on the other hand, can and does change.

BTW Italy has indeed a big problem with corruption, but one funny thing is that most Italians like to publicly bash Italy, so the relative perception of corruption is even higher than it actually should be, especially vs countries where most people think "right or wrong, my Country" ;)

Well, Russia is neither North or South in this context, it is East. There's also a slant so that it's perhaps Nort-West compared to South-East.

But I also have the perception that within Italy, there is quite a strong north-south divide? Turin and Milan are quite different from Naples and Palermo, also in the mind of Italians, regarding level of corruption?

Don't you think this North/South rule is starting to get a little too many exceptions?

In Italy, too, there are big variations, but they aren't really so correlated to latitude (even if many people superficially think that way). Most of Sardinia is south of Naples, but the disrespect for rules/corruption is much lower (eg in Cagliari, which is a lot to the south of Naples). It's just not as simple as that.

> Are you trying to tell me that countries from the former Soviet block are corruption free?

Not at all!

But, yes, there /is/ a correlation between corruption and latitude.

It's Greece which wants more money. Not Germany and France.

Actually, what Greece wants is debt relief. Not more debt.

When your debt is forgiven -- or rather, paid by others -- you can borrow more. And that's what they want -- how else can they keep the current circus going?

Greece has a budget surplus before debt payments now. This is a new situation, of course.

They briefly had a primary surplus. Are you willing to bet that they still do?

Greece is almost broke. They don't have the money to pay all their welfare... Tax income is shrinking...

How is Dijsselbloem even remotely close to being right-wing?

Yeah, kind of nonsense. He's part of the Labour party here, definitely not right wing.

It's true that Labour in Europe made a big swing towards right. It's now more often firmly at the centre, instead of left of centre, on a host of economic issues. And so you could then say he's rightish, especially in his European position as opposed to his Party position in the Netherlands... but then you can throw a lot of terms out of the window and it becomes impossible to label anything anymore.

For example, in Europe we tend to consider most Democrats to be Rightish-Wing, and consider most Republicans just 'way out there', the notion that democrats are leftist is kind of ridiculous here. Left would be the Green Party for example. But we call them left because in the spectrum of dem/reps in the US, they're relatively left. We could say they're both 'right' and then come up with other differentiating words to describe em, but it never really catches on...

Same with Labour on a national level, Dijsselbloem is part of labour and labour is generally left in the political spectrum of a country, for what it's worth.

On monetary issues I think it's fair to say that many European center-left finance ministers (excluding perhaps French ones) are rather towards the right, at least since the 1990s. On fiscal policy center-left European governments are left-ish, supporting high taxation which pays for a social welfare state. But when compared to Americans on monetary policy, they tend to have positions closer to the Republican Party than to the Democratic Party, closer to orthodox neoliberal views (Milton Friedman, etc.) than to Keynesian or MMT style views regarding proper management of government debt, business cycles, and recessions. Which I think is one of the disconnects: even when Varoufakis advocates pretty mainstream Keynesianism that would be center-left in the U.S., he's perceived as being quite far left. (It doesn't help that he occasionally describes himself as "Marxist", but his actual proposals bear a lot more resemblance to Keynesian economics than Marxian economics.)

The term you are looking for is neoliberalism. A set of thinking that has spread across Europe since Thatcher did her union busting.

Unless you are on the fringe left of parties, you adhere more or less fervently to the idea that a minimal government that buy services from private companies is the way to do things. It is "utility maximizing" taken to the level of religion.

This has lead to ever more measurements and goals in government, often referred to as New Public Management.

Yeah, I edited that in to make it clearer. This is one odd thing about Europe: in some ways it is left of the US, but in other ways quite right of the US. To take an example I'm familiar with in academia (I've worked in both American and Danish universities), Danish universities are more progressive in one sense: there is no tuition, education is free and universal. But in return, they are also much more shamelessly neoliberal about the goal of the university: the goal of universities is to increase the Danish GDP. Both their educational and research activities are measured by the extent to which they "create value for Denmark". That view exists in the US too, but only the right wing really buys into it full stop, whereas in Denmark even the Social Democrats hold it, and have recently initiated a set of university reforms on that basis.

I guess the thing to consider is that at some point the European left adopted the idea that educating society was the way to the leftist dream of a egalitarian society.

Problem is that most of the leftist parties at that time were run by people that had little to no actual worker background, and the situation has since become ever more solidified.

End result is a quiet disdain for people that choose industry or service work over a university degree.

I met with Yanis a bit over a year ago in Austin, to interview him for a book on Bitcoin that I haven't completed yet (too much work with my full-time job).

He is clever, has a vast knowledge, and you're right, he "speaks his mind". Rare, but valuable.

Wouldn't projecting Syriza as more leftist than they really are, be good marketing for them among Greeks?

At the moment, probably yes: the most effective attack on them in Greek media of the past month or so, which has reduced their popularity, is to portray them as "same boss, new suit (but no tie)". A big joke in particular has been over Varoufakis's use of the term "the institutions" as a substitute for the now-banned "troika". Part of Syriza's election platform was that Greek domestic policy would no longer be controlled by memoranda with "the troika" (IMF, EU, ECB). But now they talk about reaching agreements with "the institutions", who happen to be the exact same three institutions. So the wording change is widely seen as a bit of a farce.

Varoufakis is quite rightwing compared to his other 'comrades' who still live in the cold war.

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