Ex-Greek Finance Minister Suggests China Give Money to Every Citizen

Zhang Weiwei:
Obviously, now two countries (China-US) are moving in two different directions in the digital economies. So my final question is, how if you are to give advice to the Chinese government at this particular moment, what advice you would give in terms of at least economic relations, financial relations, via a vis the United States?

Yanis Varoufakis:
China saved capitalism in 2008, central banks, western central banks in China, simply by boosting your investment rate so high, you create a demand for their goods. So Germany that lost the Greek market, the Italian market, the French market, because Europe collapsed if they were not selling to you folks, if they were not taken advantage of the growth here, because of the accelerator multiplier effects of this boost in investment here, Germany would have died much earlier.

So it’s correct. You cannot save capitalism again, because capitalism has committed suicide in the west and intentionally. The combination of bankers and big tech and what I call cloud capital, they’re not even interested in saving capitalism. Why should you save capitalism? My concern for the future is twofold, comes in two dimensions. One is war, because the Americans have determined to pursue never ending wars the same way that they invaded Iraq in 1991 in order to boost aggregate demand.

They fear China and they fear China because here you have developed digital capital, cloud capitals as I call it, in conjunction with your finance, I call it cloud finance. You have a cloud finance here where the Americans don’t have. They have the rickety old fashioned dollar payment system, which is not digitized, not because can’t do it technique technologically, but because Wall Street does not want to share the profits with Silicon Valley. So the Americans worry that your digital payment super highway will undercut the dollar payment superhighway or highway. That is where the power comes from today, not so much for the military, but from the dollar. So they will keep squeezing China in order to prevent, they want to terrorize Indonesians, Malaysians, Africans, Germans, even Chinese, they want to terrorize everyone, so as not to use the Chinese digital payments superhighway. That’s my view. And they are prepared to go all the way to nuclear war for that, because you’ve got to remember the American establishment are in the same way that you have all these this gun violence, it’s a very violence society.

I actually love America. I’ve lived in America. I think they are very strange people. But most of them are lovely people. And they have many human qualities, but the American regime is violent, deeply violent. Have you seen the cruelty with which they attack their students on campuses in the 1960s, the anti Vietnam or today, the way they imprisoned their own people, half of the Americans live in prisons. This is a violent society. They would use nuclear weapons against California, to maintain these coasts global dominance. So that’s why, I’m exaggerating a little bit, but not much, to make the point that why I’m worried about nuclear war. There’s some one thing I’m worried.

In recent years, many cities in China have distributed electronic consumption vouchers to boost domestic consumption.

The second thing I’m worried about is I don’t want China to become a new Germany. I saw how Germany I explained that before I didn’t manage the macroeconomic environment and kept believing that it could export its way out of domestic trouble. Because if you increase your manufacturing investment, but in a way where you are making yourself dependent on exporting the manufacturing products, then you are becoming more dependent on the United States deficits like the Germans did. And then either you’re going to have to impose austerity and to cut down, and maybe then that will create social cohesion problems in China. So I would like to see a 5 year plan for boosting, effectively giving me people money in this country. I would do it really, very simple. You have the digital Renminbi, give every Chinese citizen a digital bank account with your central bank and put a sum of money in everybody’s account without any conditions, take it and spend it, to increase the consumption rate in order to create the domestic demand, so as not to need, not to trade, but to have a net exports to have surpluses. I’m sure the Chinese authorities are thinking about that. But I think you need to be more radical in your way of thinking. My idea of a basic income sounds radical, but what it would really help domestically and what the people of Europe, the people of the United States who are being constantly bombarded with anti Chinese propaganda.

If you did that something like that, they would say hang on a second, they are giving money away to the Chinese people, and they are taking everything from us, that will be the most important propaganda coup by China while balancing your national accounts and your macro economy.