Game Over: The Inside Story of the Greek Crisis by George Papaconstantinou (review)

Abstract

In 2009, Greece was hit by a devastating sovereign debt crisis that forced the country to seek help from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The agreement (also known widely as the memorandum) signed in May 2010 provided an emergency loan to the country in exchange for deep austerity measures that included sharp tax increases, deep salary and pension cuts, and reductions in government spending. This drew enormous attention by the news media and the scholarly community. A plethora of publications have identified and analyzed the causes and consequences of the Greek crisis. More recently, works from insiders (or people with close connections to insiders) have made their appearance, aiming to provide the reader with more intimate and eyewitness perspectives of what went wrong and how Greece came to the brink of economic catastrophe and exit from the eurozone, a phenomenon known as Grexit. Among the recent publications is Welcome to the Poisoned Chalice, the work of American economist James K. Galbraith, who served as unofficial advisor to Yanis Varoufakis, finance minister in the first SYRIZA cabinet (January to July 2015). In this collection of speeches and essays, Galbraith counsels the leftist government to abandon the euro and return to the national currency, the drachma. Another book in this line is And the Weak Must Suffer What They Must? by the mercurial former finance minister himself. Like some others, Varoufakis attempts to make the case that the severity of the memorandum with the socalled troika (Central European Bank, the EU, and the IMF) would not solve the country’s financial problems and, instead, would lead to chronic economic decay and impoverishment. Varoufakis has promised a sequel, scheduled to