Yanis Varoufakis

Yanis Varoufakis (Greek: Γιάνης Βαρουφάκης; born 24 March 1961) is a Greek economist. He is the current Finance Minister of Greece. In the January 2015 general election, he was elected to the Greek parliament, representingSYRIZA and took office in the new government of Alexis Tsipras two days later, on 27 January 2015, He is apolitical economist and author, and has dual Greek-Australian nationality.

Varoufakis is a participant in the current debates on the global and European crisis, the author of The Global Minotaur, a Professor of Economic Theory at the University of Athens and a private consultant for Valve Corporation.

career

Varoufakis graduated from Moraitis School in Athens. After training in mathematics and statistics, he received his economics doctorate in 1987 at the University of Essex. Before that he had already begun teaching economics and econometrics at the University of Essex and the University of East Anglia. In 1988, he spent a year as a Fellow at theUniversity of Cambridge. From 1989 until 2000 he taught as Senior Lecturer in Economics at the Department of Economics of the University of Sydney. In 2000, he moved back to his native Greece where he became Professor of Economic Theory at the University of Athens. In 2002, Varoufakis established The University of Athens Doctoral Program in Economics (UADPhilEcon), which he directed until 2008. From January 2013 he taught at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

Euro crisis, economic policy and A Modest Proposal

From January 2004 to December 2006, Varoufakis served as economic adviser to George Papandreou, of whose government he was to become an ardent critic a few years later. The author of several books on game theory, Varoufakis is also a recognised speaker and often appears as guest analyst for news media like theBBC, CNN, Sky News, RT and Bloomberg TV among others. In November 2010, he and Stuart Holland, a former Labour Party MP and economics professor at the University of Coimbra (Portugal), published A Modest Proposal, a set of economic policies aimed at overcoming the euro crisis. In 2013, Version 4.0 of A Modest Proposal appeared with the American economist James K. Galbraith as a third co-author. This version was published in late 2013 in French with a supporting foreword by Michel Rocard, former Prime Minister of France. Since September 2011, Truman Factor features select articles by Varoufakis in English and in Spanish. Varoufakis compares the role of the US economy since the 1970s in relation to the rest of the world with the minotaur.

The Globalizing Wall

In 2005/6, Varoufakis travelled extensively with artist Danae Stratou along seven dividing lines around the world (in Palestine, Ethiopia-Eritrea, Kosovo, Belfast, Cyprus, Kashmir and the US-Mexico border). Stratou produced the installation CUT: 7 dividing lines, while Varoufakis wrote texts that then became a political-economic account of these divisions, entitled The Globalizing Wall. In 2010 Stratou and Varoufakis founded the project Vital Space.

Valve Corporation

Beginning in March 2012, Varoufakis became Economist-in-Residence at Valve Corporation. He researched the virtual economy on the Steam digital delivery platform, specifically looking at exchange rates and trade deficits. In June 2012, he began a blog about his research at Valve. In February 2013 his function at Valve was to work on a game for predicting trends in gaming.

Political career

Varoufakis was appointed Finance Minister by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras in the aftermath of the SYRIZA victory in the January 25 parliamentary election. A self-described 'libertarian Marxist'- "In truth, Karl Marx was responsible for framing my perspective of the world we live in, from my childhood to this day. It is not something that I volunteer to talk about in 'polite society' much these days because the very mention of the M-word switches audiences off."

source: http://el.wikipedia.org/