YANIS VAROUFAKIS
When the euro crisis was young, some of us became convinced that a massive public green investment program was necessary to save Europe from economic stagnation and from the ultra-right that would emerge as stagnation’s sole beneficiary. In 2017, I put a figure on what was needed: up to 5% of Europe’s total income for investment in green energy and sustainable technologies. Since we knew then, as we know now, that neither the European Union’s member states nor the EU’s budget could afford this sum, I proposed a novel way to finance it through European Investment Bank (EIB) bonds guaranteed by the European Central Bank (ECB).
When I presented this idea to the committee of European finance ministers and central bankers in 2015, it was never rejected because it was never debated. Not giving up, in 2019 I ran for the European Parliament elections in support of DiEM25’s Green New Deal for Europe, arguing that the 5% green investment campaign could be “for progressives what immigration and racism is to the rightists.” Instead, the incoming European Commission, under Ursula von der Leyen, adopted a hopelessly underfunded so-called Green Deal that was macroeconomically insignificant and, as I had warned, environmentally duplicitous.
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