Yanis Varoufakis is Greece’s former finance minister, a politician with pan-European appeal, and an academic economist at the heart of the current debates on global and European macroeconomic issues.

 

Varoufakis read mathematics and economics at the Universities of Essex and Birmingham. He has been professor of economics at the Universities of East Anglia, Cambridge, Sydney, Glasgow, Athens and Texas, as well as an in-house economist for a software company. He is author of a number of books, including The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the World Economy. His next book, to be published in April 2016 by Nation Books (New York), is entitled: And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe’s crisis America’s economic future.

 

Varoufakis was, in his own words, “thrust onto the public scene by Europe’s inane handling of an inevitable crisis”. He was elected to Greece's Parliament with the largest share of votes in January 2015 and served as Greece’s Finance Minister (January to July 2015). During his term he experienced first hand the intricate and complex relationship between government, markets and electorates, the European Union's institutions, the IMF, as well as the global political, economic and financial arena.

 

Varoufakis is a passionate, eloquent and thought-provoking speaker on issues relating to the global economy after the 2008 crisis, America’s role in global affairs, the on-going Eurozone crisis and Europe’s future direction, economic thinking, digital money, the nexus between art and political economics, and trends in contemporary capitalism.