Adults in the Room: My Battle with the European and American Deep Establishment

The internationally bestselling memoir by an insurgent finance minister What happens when you take on the establishment? In Adults in the Room, renowned economist and former finance minister of Greece Yanis Varoufakis gives the full, blistering account of his momentous clash with the mightiest economic and political forces on earth. After being swept into power with the leftwing Syriza party, Varoufakis attempts to re-negotiate Greece’s relationship with the EU—and sparks a spectacular battle with global implications. Varoufakis’s new position sends him ricocheting between mass demonstrations in Athens, closed-door negotiations in drab EU and IMF offices, and furtive meetings with power-brokers in Washington, DC. He consults and quarrels with Barack Obama, Emmanuel Macron, Christine Legarde, the economists Larry Summers and Jeffrey Sachs, and others, as he struggles to relieve Greece’s debt crisis without resorting to punishing austerity measures. But, despite the mass support of the Greek people and the simple logic of Varoufakis’s arguments, he succeeds only in provoking the fury of Europe’s elite. Varoufakis’s unvarnished memoir is an urgent warning that the economic policies once embraced by the EU and the White House have failed—and spawned authoritarianism, populist revolt, and instability throughout the Western world. Adults in the Room is an extraordinary tale of brinkmanship, hypocrisy, collusion, and betrayal that will shake the global establishment to its foundations.