Greece's finance minister channels FDR: 'I welcome their hatred'

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Minister of Finance of Greece Yanis Varoufakis

REUTERS/Ints Kalnins

Minister of Finance of Greece Yanis Varoufakis attends Eurogroup tour-de-table during informal meeting of Ministers for Economic and Financial Affairs (ECOFIN) in Riga, Latvia, April 24, 2015.

Amid high-level brinkmanship by Greece's finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, the euro zone officials negotiating the next tranche of bailout funds to cash-strapped Athens are getting frustrated. 

Earlier this week, a participant of the April 24 meeting in Riga, Latvia, called Varoufakis was a "time-waster, a gambler, and an amateur." And now eight participants talked to.Bloomberg about how the game theorist's brash style made the talks maddening.

"All the ministers told him: this can't go on," Spanish politician Luis de Guindos told Bloomberg. "The feeling among the 18 was exactly the same. There was no kind of divergence." 

Varoufakis, for his part, sees the political turmoil differently: He tweeted a line from US President Franklin D. Roosevelt's  1936 speech on the eve of a national election.

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