A report on a talk by Yanis Varoufakis, author of The Global Minotaur, gives some nice history of how we got here. The Minotaur is a marvelous metaphor for what governments have allowed to occur in the global financial system. Now they, and all of us, are being skewered by its horns:
“In the immediate post-war era, Varoufakis claims, “the Americans begin to take seriously the redemptive mission to save capitalism from itself.”
But in doing so, against its apocalyptic competition with the Soviet Union, America spread itself too thin. Or too thick. By the time it was funding LBJ’s Great Society reform programme, alongside the dire weight of the Vietnam war effort, America stopped being a surplus nation. It went into deficit.
What followed was a worldwide project to balance everyone else’s books in line with the Americans own – what Paul Volcker, American economist and head of the Federal Reserve from 1979-1987, called the “controlled disintegration of the world economy”…..
Towards the end of his speech, Varoufakis claimed: “The Left and Right miss the significance of this current juncture. It is not terminal for capitalism, but it has ended the conglomeration of illusions in how we viewed the world. It ended the illusion we had that we had something called free market capitalism.”
via The scourge of government debt – macrobusiness.com.au | macrobusiness.com.au.