It's not clear if Schauble was fully serious in putting this proposal on the table or that he had the backing of Angela Merkel to pursue it. However if debt forgiveness within the euro was not a possibility, this sort of orderly exit certainly would have been the best possible option. If there was any way Greece could have pushed forward along the lines Schauble suggested to Varoufakis, this should have been his top priority. However his book suggests that he treated the proposal as a passing curiosity, not something that should distract him from his quest for a debt write-down within the euro.
There is one point that should jump out at any reader of this book. The title, "adults in the room" is a quote from I.M.F. managing director Christine Lagarde. It refers to the people with whom Varoufakis spent his six months negotiating. By contrast, he and his scruffy populist colleagues had questionable status in this world.
On this topic it is worth checking the scorecard. These are the people who controlled economic and financial policy as the world saw the growth of asset bubbles of unprecedented size. The collapse of these bubbles, coupled with the weak response of fiscal policy, and to a lesser extent monetary policy, cost the world tens of trillions of dollars of lost output. This translated into tens of millions of people needlessly going unemployed, millions losing their homes, and others going without access to health care or being denied the opportunity to get an education. (FWIW, the I.M.F. now projects that Greece's primary budget surplus in the years ahead will be almost exactly the 1.5 percent of GDP offered by Varoufakis.)
The events of the last decade were a true disaster from which we have still not fully recovered. In a just world, the people who were responsible for this momentous failure would have been pushed out of their jobs. Instead, with few exceptions, the same group of people who led us into disaster are still the ones determining economic policy. These people may have considerable power, but that doesn't make them adults.
Note: The description of the exchange with Summers has been corrected from an earlier version, which said we don't know what he said to Summers.
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