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Message: <blockquote data-quote="rickyb" data-source="post: 5223661" data-attributes="member: 56035">Brancaccio: The austerity that we’ve reported so much about has not gone away if you go to Greece.<h4></h4>Varoufakis: It is actually getting deeper. But look, this is absolutely understandable because when you have a bankrupt state, bankrupt banks, bankrupt companies and bankrupt households, and everybody is pretending or we’re being forced to pretend that we can escape this bankruptcy through borrowing more, an 8 year old will tell you that our count won’t end well and this cycle — austerity leading to insolvency, insolvency creating more austerity and so on — this downward spiral cannot end on its own.[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.marketplace.org/2017/11/03/greek-finance-minister-yanis-varoufakis/[/URL]sounds like ukraine...Brancaccio: Just so we know a piece of the story, what did the finance minister of Germany want to do but his chancellor wouldn’t let them do?Varoufakis: Wolfgang Schaeuble, decades ago, was a committed federalist, but a combination of Angela Merkel — who usurped him and effectively stole, that’s in his view, the prime ministership, the chancellorship from him, as well as the French, did not want a proper federation.They wanted all the benefits from a common currency, but without the obligations of a federal democratic political system. Schaeuble was against that. But over the years, he became a cynical man, using the finance ministry to do that which he would have wanted to do as the chancellor of Germany. And his No. 1 priority became to tame Paris. His argument was very simple: “They want our money.” That’s how he conceives the euro — as a Deutsche mark. “I will have to have control over the national budget. It’s very, very simple.” And Greece was collateral damage. He said this explicitly to me: “How can I let you off the hook? What will the French think?”Brancaccio: To tame Paris, to tame the French — the other power center.Varoufakis: That’s a point that you mentioned before — when you treat one European people as expendable and as collateral damage in a kind of war, a dirty war against another large country like France, effectively you’re condemning Europe to constant fragmentation and disintegration at the economic, financial and moral level.</blockquote>

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