The speed with which a London publisher reacted when one of its authors became the Greek finance minister tells us a lot about the power of digital technologyIn 2013, north London-based publisher Zed Books released The Global Minotaur as part of its Economic Controversies series. The book detailed the deep history of the eurozone and global economic crises, and traced their roots all the way back to the Great Crash of 1929 and the restructuring of global finance in the 1970s. Its Greek author used the figure of the Cretan minotaur, fed on an endless stream of Athenian youth sent as tribute, as a model for the way Europe and the rest of the world had increasingly poured its capital into Wall Street, giving it the financial muscle to explode in the 80s – and drag everyone down in the 00s.At the beginning of 2015, that author, the economist Yanis Varoufakis, leapt into public view when he was appointed as Greek finance minister under the newly elected Syriza government, with the responsibility for renegotiating Greece’s financial relationship with the EU. Within only a few days, Zed released a free ebook, Europe After the Minotaur, an updated extract from the earlier book covering the central points of Varoufakis’s thinking and strategy for restructuring European finance, just as Varoufakis himself started to put them into practice, under huge media scrutiny. Continue reading...
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