Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar
1/13/26: Yanis Varoufakis On Trump, Venezuela, The Fed & MORE!
13 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chapter 2: What is Trump's strategy regarding Venezuela and its significance?
It was designer chaos. John Connolly, the Treasury Secretary of Richard Nixon, traveled to Europe and effectively did a trump on them. He said, you know, guys, you're on your own. The dollar is our currency, but from today it's going to be your huge problem. I don't give a damn. You can go and jump.
This is all about maintaining and enhancing American hegemony while at the same time increasing our deficits. And I'm going to divide the dollar. Now, you mentioned the use of tariffs by Donald Trump. Well, he's not the first one to have used tariffs as a ramming rod, as a weapon. Ronald Reagan in 1985. Remember the so-called Plaza Accords, the Plaza Debates? What did he do?
He got the Japanese in one room and said, okay, you have grown your trade surplus with the United States immeasurably and I'm going to smack you over the head with a blunt instrument. And the blunt instrument is 150% tariffs if you don't agree to revalue, to increase the value of the yen. effectively to devalue the American dollar vis-a-vis the Japanese currency. And, you know, they rolled over.
And the result is that Japan is finished, kaput, ever since the Plaza Accords. So, you know, all this, I mean, in a sense, you're quite right. He's bringing a new intensity of chaotic behavior, and a lot of it is personal. But you said that there were AI or randomly chosen tariff rates. Look, by the way, there were not. There was a very simple deterministic formula. He simply...
computed his tariffs, the Liberation Day tariffs, in proportion to the trade deficit the United States had with particular countries. It was really very, there was nothing reciprocal about them. It was, you know, the greater your trade surplus towards the United States, the greater the tariff I'm going to slap on you. But he never meant to keep these.
These were simply, you know, these blunt instruments that he used to batter people around, to hit them about the head, and then say, okay, now come and negotiate with me, each one of you separately. Now, he has gone into a territory of personal self-celebration that we've never seen from any American president in the past. That's quite correct.
I mean, I was astonished at the way he has behaved vis-Ć -vis Prime Minister Modi of India. One would have thought that the United States would be very eager to see India move away from China, move away from the BRICS, you know, go into bed with the Trump administration. He hasn't done that.
And instead he has chosen to make the issue of whether he was the one that stopped the recent skirmish war between India and Pakistan the determinant of whether he's going to increase the tariffs or not. So he does that. But you know that? I mean, the madman strategy... We have to remember it was devised by Rand Corporation in the 1950s as a rational game theoretical way of behaving.
Because if you convince people that you are mad, then they will think twice before they confront you.
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Chapter 3: How does Yanis Varoufakis view the U.S. foreign policy under Trump?
No, you're absolutely right. Actually, you mentioned the Federal Reserve, given your expertise. I'm curious for what your view is here about Trump's current attack on the Federal Reserve. You're saying it's in a privatized manner. There's also some... you know, complaint about interest rates domestically here in the United States.
I do also just curious for your take for kind of the global outcry of support that Powell now has. I mean, you know, multiple central bank leaders from around the world this morning signing a letter saying that they are supportive of Jerome Powell. How do you see that? You know, you were talking about oligarchic interests, the Federal Reserve, obviously a key note in that.
By the way, you know, these central bankers will never learn By signing that letter in support of Jerome Powell, they're handing a huge, huge gift over to Donald Trump. Because Donald Trump's base hates all these people. So when they see that they are coalescing together in support of the Fed's chairman... You know, Trump is applauding all this.
You know, it's amazing, you know, those centrists, the liberal establishment, how inane they are. Do you remember during the Brexit referendum in Britain when, you know, Mario Draghi from the Central Bank of Europe and various finance ministers and bankers and central bankers generally were warning the British people, don't you dare vote for Brexit because Armageddon is going to be full.
And I knew at that moment that Brexit would win because these kinds of letters of support for the liberal establishment don't help the liberal establishment at all. Look, what's happening here is this. There are different discussions you could have. One is, is the interstate policy of the Fed appropriate? I hate to say that. I really loathe to say that. But I think that Trump is right.
the rate of interest is not going, if it's going to stay at such high levels, it's not going to do anything in order to reduce the cost of living, to reduce inflation. Inflation is not controlled by interest rates anymore. We have to understand that now we have what I call in a recent book of mine entitled Technofederalism. Sorry for plugging it, but it's important in order to make the point that
If you go to groceries around the United States, not just Walmart or Amazon, but bricks and mortar groceries, many of them, thousands of them are being controlled in terms of their pricing. by Instacart, which is a techno-feudal company that effectively uses very sophisticated algorithmic systems for ensuring that you cannot compare prices between different stores.
You cannot even compare the prices you pay with the prices that others pay. It's intense first-degree price discrimination, which is algorithmic. And we know that Instacart, on its own, along with Amazon.com, have contributed to an increase in the value of groceries by 30%. Now, there's nothing that the Federal Reserve can do that.
Even if they put up interest rates to 10%, that kind of technological inflation, inflation created by what I call technofederalism, is not going to go away. So... I fear, I hate saying that, that on the question of interest rates, I think that Trump is right. But there's a bigger question, the question about the so-called hypothesis or aspiration for central bank independence.
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