Project Syndicate
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, […]
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 – […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
NEOLIBERALISM IS DEAD. SAY HELLO TO TECHLORDISM – Project Syndicate op-ed & video
, 15/04/2025
Neoliberalism was neither new nor particularly liberal when it prevailed 50 years ago. Its great advantage was its sharp deviation from classical liberalism. Even though it paid tribute to liberal thinkers, neoliberalism shared neither their method nor their concept of the market. Today, we are on the cusp of another, equally profound, ideological innovation. Unlike […]
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 […]
Technofeudalism Is War’s Handmaiden – Project Syndicate
, 15/02/2025
War is in the air more than peace these days. This reflects not only the salience of well-known strategic traps, but also the rapid emergence of cloud capital, which is in steering the world into these traps in four distinct ways. ATHENS – The West is on a war footing. The German government is working […]
China’s Trump Dilemma – Project Syndicate
, 21/01/2025
ATHENS – With Donald Trump back in the White House, the high tariffs he has pledged to slap on Chinese imports are not China’s greatest concern. China’s leaders understand that tariffs are more significant for Trump as political and symbolic moves than as economic weapons that will seriously impede China’s growth and development. The real […]
The West Is Not Dying, but It Is Working on It – Project Syndicate op-ed
, 19/12/2024
Western power is as strong as ever. What has changed is that the combination of socialism for financiers, collapsing prospects for the bottom 50%, and the surrender of our minds to Big Tech has given rise to overweening Western elites with little use for the last century’s value system. ATHENS – A motley crew of […]
America’s Trade Deficit Is Not Afraid of Donald Trump – Project Syndicate op-ed
, 02/12/2024
If the US president-elect’s efforts to eliminate America’s trade deficit succeed, real-estate prices in Miami and Manhattan will crash, the cost of servicing government debt will skyrocket and the Dow Jones will plummet. Perhaps he should be reminded that the most vengeful of deities is one that grants him his sincerest wish. ATHENS – Donald […]
The Road from Fascism – Project Syndicate op-ed
, 19/08/2024
Once fascism is in the air, it is pointless to pander to xenophobia, as liberals do when they embrace an anti-immigrant agenda, or to rail against austerity, as leftists do. Neither issue is what is really fueling far-right extremism, which is good news for progressives. ATHENS – The recent riots in the United Kingdom have […]
Macron and Europe’s Centrists Are Out of Good Options – Project Syndicate op-ed
, 26/07/2024
After four years of pandemic-induced fiscal laxity, the eurozone’s rules are back in force, requiring that France impose severe austerity measures to reduce its deficit. Though no political party ever wants to go down this road, it is the only choice that French President Emmanuel Macron has left himself. ATHENS – France’s political impasse reflects […]
Three Myths Haunting the West – Project Syndicate op-ed
, 26/06/2024
Three myths underpin the collective frustration of Western centrist political leaders, who have long taken their hegemony for granted. Each myth is worse than erroneous, and debunking them is a necessary, if insufficient, step toward making sense of the present. ATHENS – Confident elites reflect viable regimes. Today, elites on both sides of the Atlantic […]
Strict Separation Is Not the Answer for Palestine and Israel – Project Syndicate op-ed
, 29/05/2024
As the bombs continue to fall, and the propaganda war rages, it is hard to imagine any way out of the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy. But that could reflect our failure to imagine two states whose purpose is to bring the two people closer, not to create two apartheid states where there is now one. ATHENS – […]
The day Germany banned me! – Project Syndicate op-ed
, 30/04/2024
Germany recently prohibited a Palestinian Congress from taking place in Berlin, arrested its Jewish supporters, and barred one of its organizers, Greece’s former finance minister, from entering the country. But the turn to repression is powerful evidence that the country’s pro-Israel political consensus is breaking down. ATHENS – Three weeks ago, I was banned from entering […]
A European War Union? – Project Syndicate op-ed
, 22/04/2024
Advocates of European unity used to celebrate the European Union as a peace project. But well before Russia invaded Ukraine, the European vision of a peaceful road to shared prosperity had begun to frazzle, and now the invasion has facilitated the EU’s mutation into something much uglier. ATHENS – Europe has become unrecognizable. Advocates of […]
Economics is Irredeemably Sexist – Project Syndicate
, 01/04/2024
One reason women avoid the field of economics is the male chauvinist pig standing at its center, masquerading as the model of rationality. No sensible woman recognizes herself in Homo economicus, who always gets what he likes and likes what he gets. ATHENS – Economics has an intractable “women problem.” High-school girls avoid it. Female undergraduates abandon it. And […]
The Two Faces of the Euro: Jacques Delors and Wolfgang Schäuble – Project Syndicate Long Read
, 03/02/2024
Of all European politicians who never led their countries, Jacques Delors and Wolfgang Schäuble had the greatest impact on Europe. Between them, the two men, who passed away within a day of each other in December, shaped today’s European Union, warts and all. ATHENS – Of all European politicians who never led their countries, Jacques Delors and Wolfgang […]
Europe’s Bad China Bluff – Project Syndicate op-ed
, 24/12/2023
Against the backdrop of the new cold war between the United States and China, the European Union’s top brass seems to be adding to the pressure on China by issuing credible threats in response to four grievances. Alas, the Chinese authorities are probably more amused than alarmed. ATHENS – On the December 7, the presidents […]
Europe’s 15-Year Slump – Project Syndicate op-ed
, 22/11/2023
The European Union’s supporters celebrate the survival of the euro, the fact that public debt is no longer the threat it was, and, crucially, that their mercantilist business model remains intact. But it has come at a steep price: Europe’s permanent stagnation and continuing fragmentation. ATHENS – Europe is languishing in a long-term economic slump whose origins […]
Big Tech Cannot Be Regulated – Project Syndicate op-ed
, 01/11/2023
Big Tech is so profoundly different from other industries that it cannot be regulated like the trusts, cartels, or conglomerates of the past. After all, if regulators tried to break up Facebook or TikTok, they would be confronted by enraged users for whom the universal nature of these platforms is the reason they use them. […]
Christine Lagarde’s Gifts to Populists – Project Syndicate
, 27/09/2023
Since taking over as president of the European Central Bank in late 2019, Christine Lagarde has committed three major errors that play right into the hands of right-wing populists. Now, one can only hope that these parties’ own incompetence will sink them before next year’s European Parliament elections. ATHENS – Christine Lagarde’s three blunders as president […]
New AI Germ Busters Can Also Bust Unions – Project Syndicate op-ed
, 18/07/2023
Humanity has now developed AI algorithms capable of fully decoding a killer bug’s proteins and creating an effective antibiotic. Was there ever any doubt that conglomerates like Amazon would seize upon this opportunity to shrink workplaces along their supply chain where AI predicts a higher probability of unionization? ATHENS – Last week brought a rare good-news […]