Adam Tooze's Blog, page 35

Talking Politics Podcast – The Tragic Choices of Climate Change

David talks to Helen Thompson and Adam Tooze about the choices facing the world in addressing climate change. Can we transition away from fossil fuels while maintaining our current ways of living? Will we
act in time if we also insist on taking our time? Can the West uphold its values while getting its hands dirty with China? Plus we discuss whether American democracy is the worst system of all for doing what
needs to be done.

More on the Talking Politics website.

Inflation: Sind die Sorgen berechtigt?

Mit Beginn des neuen Jahres mussten Verbraucher mehr Geld beispielsweise für Süßwaren, aber auch Benzin oder Diesel ausgeben. Die Inflationsrate lag in Deutschland nach Zahlen des Statistischen Bundesamts im Februar bei 1,3 Prozent. Wirtschaftsredakteurin Lisa Splanemann und Wirtschaftshistoriker Adam Tooze sprechen über die Frage, inwieweit etwas Wahres in derzeitigen Inflationssorgen steckt und welche Rolle die Corona-Situation bei der Inflationsentwicklung spielt.

More on inforadio.de

The Green New Deal’s time has come – but what’s happened to Labour’s radicalism?

The party risks a dead end with its ‘Little Britain’ thinking, in marked contrast to the bolder path taken by Joe Biden

What a difference power makes.

The past 18 months saw political defeats for the left on both sides of the Atlantic. Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party came to an end after a resounding Conservative victory. The Bernie Sanders campaign went down at the hands of the Democrat establishment. And yet the bitter irony of 2020 was that just as the political hopes of the left were dashed, the strategic analysis of the Green New Deal – the centrepiece of its policy vision – was spectacularly vindicated.

The Green New Deal demanded that social and economic policy should be oriented towards the immediate planetary challenge of the environment. Its proponents, groups such as the Sunrise Movement, put a “just transition” front and centre; this means fairly managing the social harms such as unemployment that would arise from an accelerated shift away from fossil fuels. Then, as if on cue, the coronavirus arrived, and delivered a devastating “inequality shock” forcing even the likes of the Financial Times to talk about a new social contract.

The Green New Deal’s politics emerged from a recognition of the fact that there was unfinished business from the financial crisis of 2008; climate activists warned that we were harnessed to a dangerous financial flywheel and demanded that finance be turned in a constructive direction. The thinking was based on the notion that the status quo was the one thing that we could not have: the events of 2020 confirmed precisely how dangerous and precarious our reality is.

Read the full article at The Guardian.

Biden’s Stimulus Is the Dawn of a New Economic Era

The United States’ massive relief package is more than a technocratic policy. It’s a democratic triumph.

There is a lot of debate right now about the meaning of U.S. democratic leadership on the world stage. In light of recent events, any pretension to that role on President Joe Biden’s part can easily seem hollow. Former President Donald Trump refuses to leave the stage. The shadows of the disputed election and Jan. 6 still hang over Washington. Republicans are as obstructive as ever. The battle to protect U.S. voting rights will have to be fought one gerrymandered and voter-suppressed district at a time.

But democratic leadership requires not just the rule of law and the observance of constitutional propriety. It requires more than just reasonable behavior on the part of all the major parties. It also needs to be demonstrated, simply put, by enacting popular policies when they are needed. Democracy is measured by how rapidly and forcefully it responds to crisis, particularly when that crisis hits those with the least security and the least influence. The urgency of those who are most hard up must be visibly felt within the political system. There are moments when democracy consists precisely in ensuring that obfuscation and procedure do not stand in the way.

On this all-important metric, the Biden administration is delivering. The $1.9 trillion stimulus package to address the United States’ ongoing social crisis, forced through by means of reconciliation in the teeth of Republican opposition, is a true example of democratic leadership in action, one that Europe would be well advised to follow.

Read the full article at Foreign Policy

Bitcoin: Das neue Gold?

Digitale Währungsformen wie die Kryptowährung Bitcoin werden gerade zu Zeiten von Corona immer relevanter. Der Wirtschaftshistoriker Adam Tooze bezweifelt allerdings, dass Bitcoin die Währung der Zukunft werden könnte. Von Lisa Splannemann.

More at INFOradio

Europe’s ‘long-Covid’ economic frailty

Last year’s agreement on an EU recovery package was widely celebrated. This year its inadequacy will sink in.

The attention of the European public is with good reason focused on the pandemic and the need to accelerate the rollout of the vaccines. But other risks lurk ahead.

Since last summer a bubble of complacency has surrounded the European Union’s recovery package and the vision it holds out of a greener future. Europe’s constructive response to the crisis contrasts pleasingly with the dark political drama played out on the other side of the Atlantic. But 2021 may bring disillusionment, as the frailty of Europe’s economic position is once again exposed.

The achievements of the EU in responding to the social and economic fallout from the crisis are real. In 2020, thanks to intervention by the European Central Bank, it avoided a return to a sovereign-debt crisis. July saw preliminary agreement on the innovative Next Generation EU package.

Read the full article at Social Europe.

The Rise and Fall and Rise (and Fall) of the U.S. Financial Empire

The dollar is dead. Long live the dollar.

If 2020 confirmed one thing, it was the centrality of the dollar to the global economy. U.S. hegemony may already have passed us in a political and strategic sense, but U.S. financial influence is proving more enduring. This is reassuring in the sense that the U.S. Federal Reserve has once again acted as a responsive and generous steward of the dollar-based financial system. But it is also a cause of puzzlement and frustration.

While China and Russia experiment with alternatives to the dollar-based payment system, in Europe the buzzword of the day is “strategic autonomy.” Given the increasing aggression of Washington’s financial sanctions, compounded by the capriciousness of the presidency of Donald Trump, this is hardly surprising. It is an obvious reaction to the weaponization of interdependence.

It is far from obvious to critics that dollar hegemony is an unalloyed blessing. Inequality, deindustrialization, and the loss of well-paid and secure blue-collar jobs can all be blamed on the dollar’s strength. In that sense, the dollar’s standing and Trumpian populism are not so much contradictions as functionally interconnected. One helped cause the other.

Read the full article at Foreign Policy.

Adam Tooze on Wages of Destruction and the Nazi economy

Prof. Adam Tooze ist spätestens seit seinem Bestseller “Crashed. Wie zehn Jahre Finanzkrise die Welt verändert haben” einer der bekanntesten Wirtschaftshistoriker der Welt. Im 10. Wfa-Spezial spricht er nun mit Ole Nymoen über das nationalsozialistische Wirtschaftssystem, das er in “Die Ökonomie der Zerstörung” präzise analysiert hat.

Adam Tooze über die NS-Wirtschaft – Spezial #10

Adam Tooze on the corona crisis and its impact on world economy

Böll.Thema – Welt im Umbruch – Adam Tooze im Gespräch

Für das Magazin „Böll.Thema“ führte der Referent Internationale Politik der Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, Jörg Haas, ein Gespräch mit dem Wirtschaftshistoriker Adam Tooze (Columbia University, New York). Im Zentrum des Gesprächs stehen die Umbrüche des Jahres 2020: Die Pandemie und ihre Folgen, die Zentralbanken und ihre Rolle in der Krisenbekämpfung, die Umbrüche in der globalen Klimapolitik, und der Wandel Europas.

Talk of a global economic reset must not ignore grim realities

Scientists may have provided us with a miraculous fix for Covid, but history shows that any path to recovery will be long.

Read the full article at the Financial Times