What's happening in Greece right now

[Magda Hassan]

Suspicious friends

A man is known by the company he keeps, so goes the adage. By this measure Yanis Varoufakis keeps very bad company for a finance minister who claims to be defending the living standards of his people. ....Then he spent the next eleven years in Australia teaching and even taking Australian citizenship.

FWIW For some time since Syriza was elected I've been asking my Greek friends here, all politically active on the left, all educated and many academics, what they know about Yanis. No one has ever heard of him or had any dealings with him here. A complete mystery. None of them support Syriza. See it as a capitalist party. So not surprising.

Strange acts

Were Varoufakis the man he pretends to be before his Greek countrymen, he would have set forth a strategy of Greek exit from the Euro and a strategy akin to that of Iceland to declare a debt moratorium, freeze all debt repayments to the TroikaIMF, ECB and EU. Then he would put Greece on a national currency, impose capital controls and seek strong economic ties with Russia, China and the BRICS countries.....
...Indeed, when Greek Prime Minister Tsipras was in St. Petersburg in mid-June to meet with Russian President Putin, Putin extended a very generous offer of prepayment of $5 billion towards the Greek participation in the Turkish Stream Gazprom pipeline.

That would have given Greece breathing room to service debt repayments to the IMF.....

Well, yes, quite so. Another mystery.
Yani has said he is totally opposed to capital controls.