Why Varoufakis walked away

[bemildred]

Athens - Yanis Varoufakis said in an interview about the reasons for his surprise resignation as Greek finance minister that whenever he tried “to engage in economic arguments” with his eurozone colleagues, all he got was “blank stares”.

“You might as well have sung the Swedish national anthem - you'd have got the same reply,” Varoufakis told the New Statesman magazine as he summed up five months of tense talks with his 18 peers to secure a new bailout.

“There was no engagement at all. It was not even annoyance, it was as if one had not spoken.”

The outspoken economist, who clashed repeatedly with Greece's creditors during the talks over a debt rescue, announced his resignation a day after the Syriza-led government won the backing of 61 percent of voters in a July 5 referendum on rejecting creditors' bailout terms.

http://www.iol.co.za/business/news/why-varoufakis-walked-away-1.1884844

[bemildred]

1. Yanis Varoufakis implies Ireland was an “energetic enemy” of Greece

Yanis Varoufakis, the motorbike-riding, Noonan-riling, tie-eschewing former Greek finance minister gave an interesting interview published in yesterday’s edition of the New Statesman, the left-of-centre British magazine.

It was full of his usual complaints about the creditor powers that held the Greek government’s feet to the fire over the weekend in return for a bailout. From an Irish perspective, however, the interview was more interesting for his observations about the attitude of various European nations to Greece’s plight.

Varoufakis complained that, when he was part of the Greek negotiating team, shortly after Syriza’s election victory six months ago, he tried to talk economics to the other finance ministers at eurogroup meetings. It “didn’t go down well” with his European peers, who displayed “point-blank refusal” to ease Greece’s debts.

“You put forward an argument that you’ve really worked on, to make sure it’s logically coherent, and you’re just faced with blank stares. It is as if you haven’t spoken. You might as well have sung the Swedish national anthem – you’d have got the same reply . . .” said Varoufakis.

http://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/yanis-varoufakis-implies-ireland-was-an-energetic-enemy-of-greece-1.2283844