Essays
On The Rest Is Politics, with Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart: From the 2008 Crash to the Rise of Populism
, 03/05/2026
A surprisingly agreeable and wholesome discussion with Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart on their THE REST IS POLITICS podcast. I wish there were more opportunities for political adversaries to engage in discussions such as this one. In this episode we begin by discussing RAISE YOUR SOUL, my latest book on the five women who taught […]
Is the Iran War America’s Suez or Its Gallipoli?
, 16/04/2026
ATHENS – When Egypt closed the Suez Canal for five months in 1956, it triggered events that shrunk the global standing of Britain’s pound sterling, inaugurated the petrodollar age, and demonstrated how a small country can inflict serious damage upon the economic power that had subjugated it decades earlier. Some argue that the United States […]
Telling the Truth About China’s Success
, 02/04/2026
Telling the Truth About China’s Success With the Persian Gulf in flames, de-escalation of the cold war between the United States and China must become the world’s top priority. To that end, it is essential to explode a powerful myth: the idea that China has cheated its way to prosperity. ATHENS – As missiles, bombs, […]
On Iran and the Left
, 14/03/2026
On Iran and the Left A Lebanese woman passes a portrait of Ruhollah Khomeini. (Anadolu/Getty) Yanis Varoufakis · Mar 14, 2026 · 7 mins Once again, I find myself caught in the conundrum of opposing an illegal war unleashed by the United States and its allies on a country whose regime I vehemently oppose. It […]
On ABC Radio National’s Late Night Live discussing war, Trump, Europe and drugs with David Marr – 5 March 2026
, 05/03/2026
Late Night Live and I go back almost three decades. Having been interviewed by Richard Ackland, multiple times by my great friend Phillip Adams, I now found myself in the studio with, current host, David Marr. Long live LNL! Program: Late Night Live Broadcast: Thu 5 Mar 2026 at 11:00am Play duration: 54 minutes 4 […]
Elon Musk’s $1.25 Trillion Mirage
, 13/02/2026
Elon Musk’s $1.25 Trillion Mirage Yanis Varoufakis — Feb 13, 2026 More often than not, share prices are rigged, which is why they are a dreadful predictor of profitability even on average, and why they have become the primary instrument for transferring wealth upwards. The SpaceX-xAI merger tells much of this sorry tale. ATHENS – […]
Can we escape AI slavery? Only the Left can tame big tech
, 12/02/2026
Can we escape AI slavery? Only the Left can tame big tech Yanis Varoufakis · 12 Feb 2026 · 6 mins This is light years beyond mere surveillance capitalism. (Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty) Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and endings, did not have two separate heads, but rather was two faces bound together into one divine […]
Is the ‘New World Order’ Really New? (w/ Yanis Varoufakis) | The Chris Hedges Report
, 28/01/2026
On The Chris Hedges Report I argue that Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ is not a genuinely new world order but a revival of traditional colonial dominance in response to China’s rise, and I examine its repercussions—AI’s role in Gaza, attacks by the Israel lobby, the risk of NATO’s implosion, and what lies ahead for Gaza […]
Fascism by the Book
, 27/01/2026
Fascism by the Book Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images Jan 27, 2026 Yanis Varoufakis Anyone who thinks that fascism had been vanquished for good in the mid-20th century should look to Minneapolis and other American cities. In Donald Trump’s America, and perhaps coming to other countries soon, the panoply of fascism’s strategies requires remarkably little […]
Yanis Varoufakis: The Imperial “Board of Peace” & End of the United Nations
, 25/01/2026
I argue that Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ is an imperialist construct that will undermine and ultimately dissolve the United Nations and the foundations of international law.
I’m watching myself on YouTube saying things I would never say. This is the deepfake menace we must confront
, 05/01/2026
I’m watching myself on YouTube saying things I would never say. This is the deepfake menace we must confront A screengrab of an AI-generated image of ‘Yanis Varoufakis’ from a deepfake video on YouTube. Illustration: YouTube It was my blue shirt, a present from my sister-in-law, that gave it all away. It made me think […]
The Left must embrace freedom: Notions of fairness and equality won’t cut it – Unherd op-ed
, 03/01/2026
The new year has dawned on a world that is hurtling towards a new Dark Age. Technologies that could free us from drudgery, poverty and environmental collapse instead make life worse for most people in most countries. The great humanist ideologies that drove social change over the past three centuries now lie in ruins, with […]
Three Shocks that Shook the World in 2025
, 22/12/2025
Three Shocks that Shook the World in 2025 Dec 22, 2025 · Yanis Varoufakis Andrew Harnik/Getty Images A new, harder, colder world order was erected on the grave of European ambition in 2025. The year’s enduring lesson is that in an age of existential contests, strategic dependency is the prelude to irrelevance. ATHENS – This […]
Big Tech are the new Soviets – Unherd
, 04/12/2025
Big Tech’s so-called Magnificent Seven are on everyone’s lips. The exorbitant stock market valuations of Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon and Tesla provoke an amalgam of awe and fear. Their trillion-dollar investments in AI prompt some to predict the brightest of futures and others to dread humanity’s dumbing down, unemployment, redundancy even. In this […]
A Trust Fund for Everyone: How to create a Monetary Commons that socialises money and funds a basic dividend without new taxes or debt
, 10/10/2025
At a time Donald Trump, Big Tech and Wall Street deploy stablecoins to privatise the dollar, usurping the decentralising power of blockchain to enrich themselves at everyone else’s expense, here is an alternative use of blockchain that harnesses its decentralising powers to benefit everyone equally – to pay everyone a substantial, non-inflationary, basic dividend – […]
Who needs Marx in 2025? The Guardian, July 2025
, 12/07/2025
To free ourselves from our technofeudal overlords, we must think like Karl Marx. The corporations would asset-strip our brains, but we can take back control A young woman I met recently remarked that it was not so much pure evil that drove her berserk, but rather people, or institutions, with the capacity to do good […]
A Trust Fund for Everyone to Defuse the Stablecoin Time Bomb – Project Syndicate
, 12/07/2025
ATHENS – Margaret Thatcher famously quipped that the problem with socialists is that, eventually, they run out of other people’s money. But what happens when bankers run out of other people’s money, as seems likely to happen soon? Either we end up with another calamitous financial meltdown or we innovate to serve the public interest […]
Jacobin’s ‘On the Legacy of Greece’s Oxi Referendum: An interview with Yanis Varoufakis’
, 12/07/2025
On the day the Financial Times published its latest article whitewashing the criminally insane troika’s (comprising the EU Commission, ECB and IMF) hatchet job on Greece, which has rendered the country a permanently bankrupt colony, Jacobin published this interview (read here, listen here) in which I lay down three basic facts: First, the referendum ten […]
On the sad disconnection between our (Western) campaign to free Palestine from our campaigns to liberate the… West – video
, 11/07/2025
My hopes these days spring not from Europe nor from the United States. Let me be frank on this. I take my hat off to the young people particularly, but not only young people, to Jewish comrades who went out on the street to demonstrate for Palestine, who were beaten up by police, who were […]
Amid Trump’s calls to remove her as UN special rapporteur on Palestine, Varoufakis, Piketty, Gosh & another 7 economists praise Francesca Albanese’s report on the Economics of Genocide – ZETEO
, 08/07/2025
Yanis Varoufakis, Thomas Piketty, Nassim Taleb, Jayati Gosh, Michael Hudson, Giuseppe Mastruzzo, Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Robert H. Wade, Christopher Cramer and Nidhi Srinivas co-sign the open letter below supporting Francesca Albanese amid US calls to remove her as the UN special rapporteur on Palestine History teaches us that economic interests have been key drivers and […]
The stablecoin time bomb hidden in Trump’s GENIUS act: Prepare for the next financial meltdown – UNHERD, 19 JUNE 2025
, 25/06/2025
Francisco Goya’s etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters was an artist’s stern warning of the hideous forces unleashed in the mind when reason lowers its guard. Today, stablecoins are the gruesome forces being released into the global economy as President Trump’s crypto dreams, unchecked by reason, morphed into the GENIUS Act. Stablecoins are the […]
A Chinese New Bretton Woods? – Quancha op-ed
, 08/06/2025
Donald Trump has made it impossible for any sensible person to persevere in the delusion that global business can continue as usual. We should all welcome this, even if we are livid with Trump’s shocking behaviour, decisions and narratives. The global economy will either be rebalanced or it will crash in ways that may make […]
Trump Wants Big Tech to Own the Dollar – Project Syndicate op-ed
, 05/06/2025
The IMF-World Bank Spring meetings are usually placid affairs that participating central bankers wish to forget soon after they are over. Not this Spring. This April the feeling several central bankers brought back home with them was not the usual relief but something far more visceral: dread, terror even. The reason? The spectre of the […]
In the EU nothing succeeds like gross failure: The astonishing case of Ursula von der Leyen – Der Freitag 29 MAY 2025
, 05/06/2025
Failure, corruption and warmongering: Ursula von der Leyen is awarded the International Charlemagne Prize of Aachen for her contribution to the EU – because in Europe utter failure is not only tolerated, but celebrated! It is one of life’s guilty pleasures when one’s cynical prejudices are confirmed. One such moment, when I allowed myself a […]