Adults in the Room

Adults in the Room, borrowing a term used pejoratively by Christine Lagarde, the head of the IMF, provides an extraordinary account of low cunning at the heart of Greece’s 2015 financial bailout.

This necessarily is a partial interpretation of history – the version of one man, a motorcycling, leather jacketed former academic and self-styled rebel who took pleasure in winding up the besuited political class.


The book Adults in the Room by Yanis Varoufakis has given rise to some very interesting criticism from Adam Tooze in The New York Review of Books (“A Modern Greek Tragedy”), J.W. Mason in the Boston Review (“Austerity by Design”), Pavlos Roufos in The Brooklyn Rail (“Inside the Disenchanted World of Left Keynesianism”) and Helena Sheehan in Jacobin (“Closed Rooms and Class War”), among others.

It wasn’t so much a bailout of Greece, though, as of its lenders, notably the struggling big banks of France and Germany. Greece still owed an impossible amount of money, only now its main creditors were the “troika” of E.C., E.C.B. and I.M.F., which went on to impose harsh austerity measures. That austerity accelerated Greece’s economic decline, making repayment of its debts even less likely.

“Adults in the Room” is several things: a gripping tale of an outspoken intellectual’s sudden immersion in high-stakes politics, an at times overwrought riposte to the many people in and outside Greece who derided his efforts and a solid work of explanatory economics. Most of all, though, it is an attempt to divine why smart, seemingly decent politicians and bureaucrats would continue pushing a pointlessly cruel approach long after its pointlessness had become clear.



You could find the movie, which based on this book, clicking on this link: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7493370/