J. Adam Tooze

Looks at the ways that current dramatic shifts in the domestic and global economy have their roots in the 2008 economic crisis and its aftermath, exploring novel themes in the way the crisis has played out for the past decade and will influence the future.

how a decade of financial crises changed the world

Crashed

Soham Dasgupta

The stark truth about Ben Bernanke’s “historic” policy of global liquidity support was that it involved handing trillions of dollars in 

 to that coterie of banks, their shareholders and their outrageously remunerated senior staff. Indeed, as we shall see, we can itemize precisely who got what. To compound the embarrassment, though the Fed is a national central bank, at least half the liquidity support it provided went to banks not headquartered in the United States, but located overwhelmingly in 

. If in intellectual terms the crisis was a crisis of macroeconomics, if in practical terms it was a crisis of the conventional tools of monetary policy, it was by the same token a deep crisis of modern politics. However unprecedented and effective the Fed’s actions might have been, even for those politicians whose support for 

 was unfailing, its practical implications were barely speakable. Though it is hardly a secret that we inhabit a world dominated by 

, during the crisis and its aftermath this reality and its implications for the priorities of government stood nakedly exposed. It is an unpalatable and explosive truth that 

Brendan M

Tooze exposes the fault lines between the political and the technical, revealing a world lurching from the crisis of 2008 to subsequent crises with deep interconnectedness between states and markets driving the decisions and the tensions. He writes, 'Political choice, ideology and agency are everywhere across this narrative with highly consequential results... as vital reactions to the huge volatility and contingency generated by the malfunctioning of the giant "systems" and "machines" and apparatuses of financial engineering.'

This is an assured and panoptical view of the global financial crisis and its many aftermaths. For the general reader, it can often be hard going as it assumes a certain knowledge of economics and financial instruments. It also has a tendency to argue by inference about the connections between the geoeconomic and the geopolitical. The book would be clearer and more persuasive by making such links explicit.

Overall, it is a fascinating read and worth the effort to understand the massive global nature of markets and the role governments play in regulating, liberalising, and responding to them.

Crashed how a decade of financial crises changed the world

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