Adults in The Room summary

So, going into 2009 and 2010, Greece was bankrupt. Yet it was being forced to pretend otherwise – that it could continue borrowing and rack up more and more debt.

To put it mildly, things weren’t looking good for Greece, and the so-called troika were about to make things even worse.

At the beginning of 2015, after two multibillion-euro loans, the Greek people were feeling pretty fed up with austerity. So they elected a new prime minister from the left-wing Syriza party.

Among the incoming government was a new finance minister: the author, Yanis Varoufakis, who was ready with a number of strategies to get Greece back in shape.

The troika claimed to have Greece's best interests at heart, but by all accounts, that heart was barely beating. They released a memorandum of understanding, or MoU, that was essentially a list of steps aimed at restoring the Greek economy. But what it really did was prove to the author that the troika had no interest in a Greece with a healthy economy that could pay back its debts.

In fact, its members seemed not to care at all about Greece’s fate, as was made crystal clear by several members of the troika establishment.

While Varoufakis continued to plead his case with the troika, other leaders in the Greek government were getting beaten down, tricked and turned against one another.

Angela Merkel wields much of the European Union’s power, and in March of 2015, she began to communicate directly with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. This move was an attempt to cut both Varoufakis and her own finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, out of the conversation. Merkel wanted Tsipras to believe that she would help Greece on her own terms.

To understand the actions of the European Union’s leadership, you need to resist the temptation to view them as sinister evildoers who are all part of some vast conspiracy. The truth is, everyone’s just trying to save their own skin and work their way up the ladder.

Larry Summers, the former US treasury secretary, put it succinctly when he told Varoufakis that there are two kinds of politicians in the world: insiders and outsiders.

The ongoing Greek bailouts began to stir up resentment and populist beliefs in citizens across Europe. They thought it was “unfair” that their tax money was going to help “lazy” Greeks, especially when their own nations’ economies were still struggling to fully recover from the financial crisis.

It’s not hard to see that this reaction to the Greek bailout played a big part in the recent unrest among many Europeans, including Britain’s vote to leave the European Union.