Greece’s former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and Irish economist David McWilliams on the hope for a global new deal

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David McWilliams: I think it is fair to say that capitalism – in the course of this unprecedented crisis – has been suspended. We are not going back to where we were, to business as usual. The state has come back, and this episode will not be forgotten by the electorate. I don’t know where we are going, but one thing seems clear: we are not going back.

Yanis Varoufakis: I like this phrase: capitalism has been suspended. The last time capitalism was suspended in the west was during the second world war, with the advent of the war economy: a command economy that fixed prices. The war economy marked the transcendence of the standard capitalist model.

The fact that Germany is now in the same pile of shit as the rest of us offers a glimmer of hope

My sense is that the period when you could travel, engage, move, we might have reached the end of that open period.

This is an edited version of a conversation that will appear in A Vision for Europe 2020: Nothing But an Alternative, published this month by Eris.

With biggest plunge in output in 300 years being predicted, we explore why the last great recession happened

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Queen Anne was on the throne. Work had just started on Blenheim Palace in honour of John Churchill’s victories over Louis XIV’s French armies in the war of Spanish succession. The union between England and Scotland was imminent.

1706 is how far economic historians have to look back to find a slump bigger than the one that now threatens the country as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.

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