Similarly, we were in deep doubt about the sustainability of the Eurozone. We wrote a couple of relevant articles but were, naturally, more or less ignored. For my part, I began a campaign in Greece warning of the tsunami that was to come; a crisis that would leave Greece in tatters and put Europe on a path toward disintegration. My warnings fell on deaf, and mocking, ears. Undaunted, Joseph and I started work on a book that would capture our views on the dead end facing the second phase of post-war capitalism and its connection to another dead end: that of economic theory.
However, the Crash of intervened and the book had to be re-written again, with the assistance of friend and Athens University colleague Nicholas Theocarakis. The Crash of and the subsequent metamorphoses of the crisis in Europe and in the world at large seem to have energised me no end.
My The Global Minotaur came out, as a result, together with a stream of commentary on the crisis and its significance. When Greece became clearly insolvent, I came out in the Greek media telling it as it was. Because I had previously had a good relationship with the then Greek PM, George Papandreou, and had served as one of his many advisors until December when I resigned , my view that Greece could not avoid default come-what-may stung the then socialist government.
For two years I kept arguing that it was an Assault on Reason to deal with a deep insolvency of both the public and the private sectors by means of the largest loan in human history that came with strings attached and that, at the same time, demanded a major reduction of the national income from which the old and the new loans would have to be repaid for this is what the austerity drive meant.
My determination to calling a spade a spade, and telling the world and our European partners the truth that Greece had gone bankrupt, was met with the charge of High Treason from the powers-that-be and, at once, with admiration from an increasing band of supporters. In other words, I was faced with a nightmare scenario. You see, there is nothing that I loathe more, dear reader, that an encounter with people who will reject what I say before I say it or, equally, who will believe what I say before I have said it.
