Former Greek fin min tweeting a session on Quora
Not his fellow fin mins' favourite person but the media darling for much of last year until he was forced to resign.
He's now back up and vocal with the launch of his new campaign group DiEM25 on which I reported here.
Here's his latest thoughts in an answer to the question: "Is there a Greek crisis or is the problem more European/system wide?"
Answer your question by means of a simple mental experiment: Suppose that Greece had chosen to stay our of the Eurozone in 2000 (or was not allowed in).
Would the Greek crisis be so prominent in the media for the past 7 years? Would Greece have lost 1/3 of its national income? Of course not. Growth would have been much slower during 1998-2008, there would have been a small recession in 2008-2010 but since 2010 Greece would be recovering.
Would the Eurozone have experienced a euro crisis? Of course it would have. It would not have started in Greece but in Ireland, in Portugal, in Italy, ... somewhere.
The reason is, of course, that the Eurozone (i.e. its banks and single currency) was never designed to sustain the shock of the 2008 global financial crisis. To recap, Greece was always a problematic social economy.
But it was its Eurozone membership that turned my country into a festering wound and the first domino to fall in a Eurozone crisis that would have taken place independently of Greece.
Hero or villain? Let us know what you make of this not-so conformist character who seeks another crack at the title.
Varoufakis - Greece became a festering wound
