Op-ed
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
UNHERD’s Freddie Sayers interviews Y. Varoufakis & W. Munchau on Europe’s prospects in the era of Trump
, 11/05/2025
UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers interviews renowned economist and former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis and Eurointelligence founder Wolfgang Münchau as they dissect the escalating trade war between Europe and the United States. With the US recently striking a so-called trade deal with the UK, and news of India signing a comprehensive agreement with the UK, tensions […]
On the political economics and the history behind Donald Trump’s tariff war – Politics JOE
, 09/04/2025
In this interview with Oli Dugmore, for Politics JOE, I had a chance to lay out – in around 30 minutes – the political economics and economic history behind Donald Trump’s tariff war. As I said to Oli, those of us who oppose Trump have a duty to understand what his team are up to […]
Should Le Pen be barred? What is the Left’s right answer on this conundrum?
, 09/04/2025
This is a crucial conversation to have in general, not particularly about Marine Le Pen. It is about the principled position that the democratic Left must take on the question of who has the right to remove the political rights (the right to vote and to seek votes) of whom. We know what can happen […]
How will Europe, Britain & China react to the Trump shock: On TIMES Radio & Unherd’s Undercurrents
, 03/04/2025
In this interview, I argue that how Trump’s Shock pans out will largely depend on whether Europe and China will act in concert or turn against one another. As for the UK, Trump has given Brexit a major boost. And here is another interview with Emily Jeshinsky of Unherd’s Undercurrents on the same subject: Trump’s […]
Will the Trump Shock prove as momentous as the Nixon Shock? UNHERD op-ed & on BBC tv
, 03/04/2025
“My philosophy, Mr President, is that all foreigners are out to screw us and it’s our job to screw them first.” With these words, the US Treasury Secretary convinced the President to deliver a colossal shock to the global economy. In the words of one of the President’s men, the objective was to trigger “a […]
The Case Against European Rearmament – Project Syndicate op-ed
, 25/03/2025
If we truly want to strengthen Europe, the first step is not to rearm. It is to forge the democratic union without which stagnation will continue to erode Europe’s capacities, rendering it unable to rebuild what is left of Ukraine once Vladimir Putin is finished with it. ATHENS – Inducting Ukraine into NATO after forcing […]
Crypto’s role in Trump’s economic masterplan (with special emphasis on stablecoins) – UNHERD
, 19/03/2025
After dismissing Bitcoin as a scam during his first White House stint, Trump warmed to cryptocurrencies during his re-election campaign. To complete his conversion, on the 6th of March the 47th President signed an executive order to set up a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and a US Digital Asset Stockpile”. The United States government sensibly stockpiles […]
Stand with South Africa against Trump’s wrath – Globe&Mail op-ed
, 18/03/2025
When the powerful punish the principled, we glimpse the unmasked face of empire. Donald Trump’s vindictive executive order denying aid to South Africa — punishment for its support of Palestine and pursuit of land reform — offers precisely such a moment of clarity. The contours of our new global struggle are now etched with brutal […]
Liberals should be outraged by Cǎlin Georgescu’s election ban – UNHERD
, 11/03/2025
Whatever happened to the notion that, faced with the enemies of democracy, we should fight their ideas but, equally, for their right to express them? The answer, unfortunately, is that it died an ignominious death on Sunday, as Romania’s Central Electoral Bureau, with the full support of the European Union’s liberal establishment, banned far-Right candidate Cǎlin Georgescu […]
Trump’s tariff chaos explained – TIMES RADIO
, 09/03/2025
“He wants to reduce the value of the dollar… in order to make American exports more competitive and imports into the United States more expensive. At the same time he wants to maintain the hegemony of the dollar.” Yanis Varoufakis explains the secret behind Trump’s tariff strategy, and his new obsession with cryptocurrency. This interview […]
The sordid paradox that was the 2025 German federal election – Euronews
, 24/02/2025
This German federal election is a paradox: Simultaneously irrelevant – in the sense that it will result into another variant of the same, quasi permanent, coalition of Christian & Social Democrats, perhaps with a splattering of the pseudo-Greens – the same coalition that put Germany on the road to a secular slump, will continue to […]
Europe in the Post-Atlanticist Era – The Guardian
, 21/02/2025
JD Vance, the US Vice President, told Europeans that their values are no longer America’s values. Pete Hegseth, the US Defence Secretary, added that Europeans “can’t make an assumption that America’s presence will last forever.” Keith Kellog, Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, confirmed that Europe will not have a seat at the table […]