Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

Aug 11, 2018 Mehrsa rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Some writers know a little bit about a lot of things. Some know a lot about one thing. Foxes and hedgehogs I suppose. Rarely does an author know a lot about a lot. Adam Tooze is that author. This book is so comprehensive and so insightful. He seems to understand nuanced political thought and history in every country in the world. I know the most about the aftermath of the 2008 crisis in the US and his description hits the nail on the head. I didn't know much about the Eurozone crisis and the Chi ...more

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Mar 16, 2019 Max rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: world-history

Tooze digs deep into the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath through 2017. He explains in great detail how the Fed, ECB, IMF, economic and political leaders dealt with a globally integrated financial system facing collapse. He ties in the political fallout which paved the way for the turmoil and nationalist movements we see today including the Ukraine crisis, Brexit and the election of Trump. It is a demanding but very worthwhile read best suited to those with an interest strong enough to wa ...more

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Sep 15, 2018 Justus rated it liked it · review of another edition

The more I read of Crashed the less I liked it. Not because it is a bad book per se. But because it wasn't the book I thought it was going to be. It wasn't the book it *could* have been.

The book is divided into three sections: a history of the 2008 crash with a focus on the US; a history of the 2010 Eurocrisis with a focus on Europe; and a third chapter that is a smattering of quasi-related "other stuff that has happened since 2010".

It was while reading this third section that my disappointment The more I read of Crashed the less I liked it. Not because it is a bad book per se. But because it wasn't the book I thought it was going to be. It wasn't the book it *could* have been.

The book is divided into three sections: a history of the 2008 crash with a focus on the US; a history of the 2010 Eurocrisis with a focus on Europe; and a third chapter that is a smattering of quasi-related "other stuff that has happened since 2010".

It was while reading this third section that my disappointment crystalized. Each of these chapters is almost entirely standalone and reads like a run-of-the-mill, not very spectacular The Atlantic article on the subject. (The section on Trump's election is probably the worst example of this.) Ukraine, Brexit, Trump's election, further European developments (particularly in Greece), even China's 2015 stock market slump. But there's very little tying these together and usually only very slight ties to earlier 2008 & 2010 crises.

In a book that is both a 10-year retrospective and carries the subtitle "how a decade of financial crises changed the world" it actually spends most of its time in "at the moment" journalistic re-telling rather than looking back historical analysis. What I mean is: you'll get lots of "and then Merkel had a meeting and said X; and then Geitner had a meeting and said Y". You get far less of "and now that 8 years have passed we can see that Merkel's statement X was totally off base because of A, B, C".

The first time I really noticed this was in a passage on the 2008 crisis when bankers & regulators were arguing about capital increases and whether X% would destroy the banks or whether Y% would leave the system disastrously risky. Well, they eventually settled on a number and 10 years have passed. Surely there's been some research? Or at least some anecdotes & case studies? Were the bankers completely wrong? Were the regulators? Instead of clarity brought to us by the passing of time we are just left with a "he said, she said" argument.

Ultimately, that's the why I felt disappointment as I read more & more. Much of this book could have been written shortly after the respective events; you'll notice, for instance, that when discussing 2008 most of the references are to things published in the 2009-2012 period. For the Eurocrisis, most of the references are to things published in 2010-2012. And the situation is even worse for the more recent events, simply because very little time has passed since most of them have occurred.

There are times where it feels like Tooze is trying to show us major recurring themes or make explicit the linkages between all of these events. But it happens pretty rarely in the 700+ pages and often takes a backseat to more detailed day-by-day journalistic reporting. I would have liked to see that priority inverted -- bring those themes to the forefront and just put in the details as needed to support the themes.

For instance, one of the themes running throughout the book is the tension between decision-making in a crisis, which doesn't exactly have time for parliamentary/Congressional discussions that can takes days or weeks, and democracy -- and the eventual backlash, especially in the US and parts of Eastern Europe, against loss of autonomy to regional/global institutions.

There's another thread about the surprising solidification of US supremacy via dollar-denominated debt but it only comes up occasionally and the consequences of it aren't explored in much detail.

Don't let my low review make you think this is a bad book. If you've never read anything else on the 2008 crisis or the Eurocrisis, this is a pretty good place to start. But I feel like this book missed an opportunity to really tie all these things together and advance a strong thesis, instead of spending so much times just being a retelling of what happened & when. ...more

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Aug 18, 2018 Elle rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: political-economy

Adam Tooze is a historian of WWI and Nazi Germany. Recently, however, he’s spent the past few years focusing on the Global Financial Crises and its aftermath, with regular updates on his excellent blog at adamtooze.com. Crashed is the long-awaited product of that research, a globetrotting, expansive history of the GFC and its reverberations and aftershocks the world over.

And indeed, as a history of the crises it’s first rate. Tooze is particularly strong in unpicking the role of historical cont Adam Tooze is a historian of WWI and Nazi Germany. Recently, however, he’s spent the past few years focusing on the Global Financial Crises and its aftermath, with regular updates on his excellent blog at adamtooze.com. Crashed is the long-awaited product of that research, a globetrotting, expansive history of the GFC and its reverberations and aftershocks the world over.

And indeed, as a history of the crises it’s first rate. Tooze is particularly strong in unpicking the role of historical contingency, how the actions taken by various political actors in governing the vast, complex, interconnected systems of global capitalism, actually had real effects and made real differences.

Straight off the bat he rightly dispenses with standard macroeconomics accounts that hone in on trade balances and national income accounting, where surplus and deficit are seen as epiphenomenon of internal credit relations, unit labour costs and national competitiveness. These accounts of world trade would have great consequences, as they led many prominent economists and commentators to predict the wrong crisis, a crisis of Sino-American relations, where China would eventually refuse to continue purchasing US Treasury bonds and securities, and the dollar would tumble. And indeed, the perspective of imbalances still holds a great deal of purchase in standard accounts of the EU crisis, and is used to justify the harsh treatment meted out to the Eurozone’s periphery.

What actually happened was a crisis of trans-atlantic finance and the implosion of bank balance sheets. And to explain this we need to look, Tooze argues, not at national income accounting, but macro-financial statistics – the flow of dollars and euros from bank to bank, country to country, financial institution to financial institution. What we find is alarming, because for all the talk of national varieties of capitalism, freewheeling Anglo-Saxons vs patient and productive Germans, we see that German and French banks were just as financialised, and just as imbricated, in the meltdown as their American counterparts. Indeed, German banks were some of the most exposed and most dangerous, their US branches had invested heavily in the US mortgage boom with dollars leveraged from US money-markets. Compared with their American counterparts, they were laughably undercapitalised given the risk exposure of their portfolio. But this fact would be entirely absent from traditional macroeconomic measures and accounts. (It’s this aspect of the crisis that the late, great Marxist IR theorist Peter Gowan so astutely identified not long after the meltdown began. He was way ahead of the curve on this and his contributions are greatly missed https://newleftreview.org/II/55/peter...)

But Merkel and Sarkozy would initially dismiss the crisis as a US problem, a meltdown that had nothing to do with them. And it was only the FED’s dramatic intervention in extending half a trillion dollars in currency swap lines to the UK, the EU and Asian central banks, ensuring that their banking systems did not collapse through a shortage of dollars, that averted a full scale breakdown.

From here, the narrative moves at a brisk pace as we follow the full scale of measures that countries did or didn’t introduce as the crisis worked itself out. TARP, the Chinese mega-stimulus, debates at the G20, Russia corralling oligarchs into line, the unfolding of the Eurozone debt crisis as private sector bailouts became a matter of public finances, honing in on the absurd and sadistic torture of Greece for the sake of French and German bank balance sheets. It concludes with the Ukraine crisis, the humiliation of SYRIZA, the rise of Trump and the long brewing emerging markets crisis that will soon unfold with full force.

It’s of the Eurozone’s response that Tooze is most contemptuous. In failing to ‘Go Big’ in response to the meltdown and co-ordinate an adequate, EU wide fiscal response, Merkel and Sarkozy are essentially guilty of economic vandalism, and this is true even from the perspective of ensuring the rude health of capitalism and capitalist enterprise. EU banks remain fragile and undercapitalised, and compared with the laughably lax regulations and stress tests imposed by the ECB, the compromised and incoherent Dodd-Frank act looks like a bold achievement in fiscal regulation and rectitude. A decade of austerity and ‘extend and pretend’ has seen EU corporations outmaneuvered and less able to compete against US and Chinese multinationals, and wild dreams of the EU as a counter-hegemonic anchor, and indeed competitor, for world power have rudely awoken to the doldrums of stagnation, catastrophic youth unemployment and social disintegration.

All good so far, and yet for an account of the crisis, it’s strangely lacking. This is an account of the crisis relayed through Tim Geithner or Gordon Brown’s memoirs, Obama’s speeches and Paul Krugman op-eds. It’s focused and brisk and well-written, but also strangely sterile. We rarely leave the realm of high-politics, and when ordinary people do make an appearance it’s through the statistics of mortgage foreclosures or measures of unemployment and income. The anger that most of us feel or the pain that we’ve gone through rarely penetrates the narrative. And when it does so, it’s fairly limp.

For all his emphasis on contingency, Tooze holds his tongue, or has little to say, about better or fairer responses to the crisis. Except perhaps his sympathy for Christina Romer’s push for an Obama stimulus twice the size of the one actually enacted that would have included distressed mortgage holders, or a strained frustration that Merkel and the ECB didn’t respond as forcefully as the US. He questions whether Bernanke and Geithner comparing themselves to firefighters or bomb disposal experts à la The Hurt Locker is apropos, but although he points out that the bailouts were elitist, kept the broken system ticking over to fight another day, and enriched a small minority of those lucky enough to benefit from capital gains, he doesn’t strain himself to dispel it. Indeed, some of them come across as unlikely heroes.

Some of the most repugnant and mendacious people, who enjoyed a great deal of levity and power, have immiserated millions of people worldwide, leading to untold misery, dashed hopes, ruined life chances and in many cases, an early death. Every single one of them has gotten off scot-free, even, it would seem, from the harsh judgement of history’s chroniclers. And around the world, everywhere you look, the far-right is on the march. What should we expect from a history of the greatest economic catastrophe in our lifetimes? A little more boldness, please.

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Sep 27, 2018 Athan Tolis rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, ec-and-finance

Crashed has been timed to coincide with the ten-year anniversary of the financial crisis of 2008.

Most books about the crisis have been written by

1. protagonists with a record to defend, such as Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke, Neil Barofsky, Mervyn King, Adair Turner and Paul Tucker
2. economists who watched from the sidelines, such as Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Bob Shiller, Atif Mian & Amir Sufi, Hans-Werner Sinn, John Kay, Bob Reich, Greta Krippner (genius!) and Simon Johnson
3. j ...more

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Aug 19, 2018 Gary Beauregard Bottomley rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This is not an easy book to follow but it is a necessary one in order to avoid being misled by bloviators of substance free self appointed spewers of financial misinformation. It deals intelligently with an incredibly complicated set of worldwide connections (financial, geo-political and sociological) and delves into one of the defining moments of our time period, the financial crisis and its aftermath.

If one reads a book about WW II, one should know the date September 1, 1939 as the date when This is not an easy book to follow but it is a necessary one in order to avoid being misled by bloviators of substance free self appointed spewers of financial misinformation. It deals intelligently with an incredibly complicated set of worldwide connections (financial, geo-political and sociological) and delves into one of the defining moments of our time period, the financial crisis and its aftermath.

If one reads a book about WW II, one should know the date September 1, 1939 as the date when it started and that way the narrative of the story telling never gets away from the reading of the book. Similarly, if one wants to understand our present times one must know the date September 15, 2008, the day that the ATMs almost did not deliver $20 bills and the day that the commercial paper almost ‘broke the buck’ if the government had not intervened. The day the world’s financial system almost collapsed. This book tells that day’s story, what led up to it and what happened after.

There’s a movie and a book that are cited by the author, ‘The Big Short’. They captured the craziness that led to the ‘great recession’. This book, ‘Crashed’, fills in the details and the aftermath and explains in a detailed and erudite fashion (unfortunately, this book does read complexly and I would even venture to say that the person who wrote the review on this book in the New York Times was not able to fully understand this book, but he definitely understood enough of why this book is important and relayed enough such that I knew I wanted to read this book. Even if a reader doesn’t know the difference between a ‘swap and a ‘repo’ or ‘reverse repo’ a reader will get the gist of the book).

The author explains the world before September 15, 2008 and what led to it, then highlights the FED and what America did right, and then looks at the pre and post 2011 period and the self inflicted chaos that Europe and Asia foisted on themselves when they wrongly dealt with the systemic problem inherent in the financial system. The world and its parts are globally connected and made of many moving parts. NATO matters and Putin was an authoritarian thrower of monkey wrenches even in those days and wanted to create chaos mainly against America and in order to try to expand his hegemony at any cost even if it meant unilaterally selling MBSs in order to hurt America just for its own sake, and China did smart things and then did stupid things.

Confidence fairies (bond vigilantes) and austerity hawks (lovers of misery for others, but never for themselves) riled against all the solutions that worked and mindlessly echoed empty slogans such as ‘don’t debase the dollar’ and ‘runaway inflation is the real threat’ and ‘balance the budget to restore prosperity’ in their substance fact free universe while preaching against every single reasonable action while being wrong about everything. The author does specifically quote from Fox News, Brietbart News and Steve Bannon, Glenn Beck and Niall Ferguson (sp?) as gloom and doom substance free and fact free mongers who had nothing but fear and feelings as their guidepost as they spouted those empty slogans. That kind of substance free critic never gets proved wrong since they have no solutions but only offer substance free criticism void of data or academic rigor. They can never fail. They can only be failed by imaginary others, and they never let facts get in the way of the false version of reality they create, because in the end they need FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) in order to maintain ignorance so they can ultimately keep people afraid and try to convince you to hate the same people they hate. This book is an antidote to that stupidity.

A major theme of the book is that blame for the crisis was put on ‘politicians, workers and welfare recipients’ and not on the real culprits ‘bankers and financial institutions’. As stated in this book, at the start of the crisis Fox News and other right wing outlets blamed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) for the crisis for allowing minorities to have subpar loans thus in their twisted world view causing the complete melt down of the housing market. This book will provide data, facts, and a narrative shooting down such irresponsible statements. The bankers and the financial institutions (with the assistance of the rating agencies) almost destroyed the financial stability of the world and their enablers in the media put the blame on politicians and regulators, workers and welfare recipients (remember, they used to say 47% of Americans don’t pay taxes as if that was the cause of the rich bankers and financial institutions stealing and purposely creating a financial bubble. The only honest thing Greenspan ever said was ‘I’m shocked, I can’t believe it. The bankers lied to me’).

We live in a complex world within a web of interlocking connections. Simpletons love to get on TV and spout their idle chatter on subjects that they know nothing about all the while thinking that the more they talk about the subject means the more they know, when in reality it’s the converse, the more they talk the less informed they are.

Reality is complex, and the financial world and its interactions are not easily comprehended. The hateful want us to remain ignorant of the connections and it is easy for them to shout ‘fake news’ and spout substance free idle chatter on my TV in order to control us through fear. The truth is out there but it sometimes takes effort to find it and understand it.

It’s not easy to understand what happened. It is easy to be misled. A book like this one goes a long way towards immunizing us from the virus of substance free deceivers. ...more

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Jan 01, 2019 Steve rated it liked it · review of another edition

This volume does a great job explaining the financial meltdown that began in 2007. I particularly found the author's discussion of liquidity, or rather the lack of liquidity, to be of interest. The first half of this book is strong and, I believe, sets the historical standard for the crisis from 2007-2012. The second half, however, reads as a general survey, presenting little insight to those who follow world affairs. For example, the author, it seems, dwells unrelentingly on that chain-smoking, ...more

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Aug 16, 2018 Henri Tournyol du Clos rated it it was ok · review of another edition

This book feels like being post-prandially cornered in your living room by a somewhat inebriated and chatty guest that goes on and on telling in no particular order unfocused anecdotes and grand ideas he gathered from other people or read about, throwing in some political commentary to boot. Although the author sometimes, out of the blue, makes some apt statement, he seems to lack the ability to discern between what is really important and what is not, and to order his thoughts. Having myself tr ...more

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Jun 17, 2019 Alex rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This is an undoubtedly brilliant account of the 2008 financial crises, both laying out the causes and the long term economic and political consequences of the events. But it's a highly technical account and a bit too dense for what I feel like consuming at this time. ...more

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May 21, 2019 Mona rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This book requires full reader's attention and is not an easy read. Author is very knowledgeable on the topic, he did very good research and in eloquent way presented facts related to 2008 financial crisis. The strength of this book lies in its global approach to the problem, not focusing only on the US (likely because autor is a Brit). The interconnections among different markets are well described. The political background to financial decisions was well presented.

However, I have to admit tha ...more

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Jun 23, 2020 Tuncer Şengöz rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: economics

It took me four months to finish this book. But it is worth it. Excellent book on the period between 2007 and 2017.

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Dec 17, 2018 Dax rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 4-stars, nonfiction

Financial crisis leads to sovereign debt crisis which leads to the rise of populism which paves the way for a Trump election.

There have been hundreds of books written about the financial crisis, but Tooze's new work is the first I have come across that illustrates the path that lead us to where we are today. In the age of global integration, financial markets and political policy walk hand-in-hand, and Tooze does a nice job of showing us how the markets have shaped the course of events for the ...more

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Oct 12, 2019 Andrew rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: european-union, united-kingdom, politics-and-political-theory, united-states-of-america, economics-business-finance, russia

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, by Adam Tooze is an epic look at the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath up to the present day. Tooze examines both the 2008 crisis in its origins within the sketchy Mortgage Baked Securities (MBS) trade, and the growth of Asset Backed Commercial Paper (ABCP) and the influence of the repo market in US securities trading. The trade in MBS had some inherent flaws, due to the creation of tranche's of bad debt that was mixed with so Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, by Adam Tooze is an epic look at the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath up to the present day. Tooze examines both the 2008 crisis in its origins within the sketchy Mortgage Baked Securities (MBS) trade, and the growth of Asset Backed Commercial Paper (ABCP) and the influence of the repo market in US securities trading. The trade in MBS had some inherent flaws, due to the creation of tranche's of bad debt that was mixed with solid real estate debt, given a AAA credit rating by ratings agencies. This high rating on bad debt was due to the the mixing of debt, its backing in commercial paper, and various insurance guarantees that sought to reduce risk and ensure a high rating. Coupled with a climate of Wall Street deregulation within the US and international governments, the increase in international banking and portfolio diversification, and increasing power within the financial community over politics, the 2008 crisis would have a major impact. It shook the fabric of confidence in Capitalism, and to this day has encouraged the growth of populist nationalism, spelling doom for traditional centrist parties, and leading to major policy upheavals across the globe, from Brexit, to Trump's pivot homeward, to the Russian conflicts in Ukraine and Georgia, and the growth of illiberal democracy in Hungary, Poland and Turkey, and the Eurozone Debt Crisis itself.

The previous decade has seen major financial upheaval in the Western world. Tooze notes the use of military doctrine in the US as they settled the financial crisis of 2008, partially nationalized numerous institutions, and increased the power of the Fed to act outside democratic traditions, in the name of banking and financial stability. These powers were not permanent, the Fed began to be questioned by populists on both the right and left, culminating in the Trump election. However, the established business interests in the United States have gained much in the way of power and clout, if not in social acceptance. Wall Street has come out ahead in the financial crisis, although things looked dicey in 2008. Banks are larger than ever, interests rates are currently rising, financial regulation from 2008 is slowly being peeled back, and so forth. Even so, Tooze does have a healthy dose of respect for how quickly the US was able to recover from the financial crisis. Although things continue to be tough in the United States, and foreclosures on homes did not peak until years after 2008, the US was able to stabilize its economy and avoid massive social disruption due to its proactive response to the crisis. The use of debt recapitalization, the Quantitative Easing (QE) program run by the Fed, and the bipartisan response from both political parties (at the time) led to a stabilization of the economy, and the avoidance of massive austerity programs and social unrest, as was experienced in Europe. Tooze is critical of the new Trump administration, and the growth of serious partisanism in the US. The Tea Party faction of the Republican Party, for example, held US debt hostage in 2013, and the following shutdown in 2018-2019 (past the publication of this book) show that political parties in the states are so at odds that they are willing to see the government shut down, and funding to social programs cease, just to score points politically. Another issue noted by Tooze is the continuing deregulation of the banking sector and Wall Street. This creates a dangerous precedent where many of the issues that lead to the 2008 crisis are returning to the for - lax regulation, rampant executive bonus schemes, the use of ABCP as a safe alternative to US treasuries, and so on.

In the Eurozone the crisis was much more protracted. The Europeans often blame American banking instability and lack of fiscal prudence for the crisis. The crisis did, after all, originate in the US with a US real estate collapse. However, the two main issues with Europe were not America's fault. Banks in Europe were massively overexposed to US ABCP. Due to the use of the US dollar as a reserve currency globally, and a lack of Euro financial regulation (within the EU), banks dealt ABCP in place of US securities as ABCP had a slightly higher return and were hot items on various markets globally. The Eurozone had a higher amount of financial trade with the United States that China did at the time, the butt of many financial rags analysis at the time. This overexposure and alck of European wide financial regulation led to some very silly figures - Ireland for example had banking debt at 7x its GDP. Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy (dubbed the PIIGS) were also experiencing financial bubbles. Spain and Ireland were experiencing massive real estate booms. Greece and Portugal were poorer EU nations trying to modernize their economies and raise their social mobility and stability. Italy was over leveraged, although not massively, but this did not matter in the face of the financial recession. Suddenly US ABCP were trading at less and less value, and banks were making less and less money off their short sell tactics on the repo markets. This led to many billions of dollars being erased off the books of European banks. It also led to banks in Europe being deemed too risky to deal with. This effected national economies on a grand scale. Ireland toyed with bankruptcy. Greece and Portugal were slowly being recognized as risky investments, affecting their ability to interact with the global market. Spain's real estate bubble collapsed. And Italy began to buckle under the strain. Other European nations were affected too. The UK suffered from a major lose of banking confidence. France's banks were exposed to some bad debt. Switzerland struggled. The European Central Bank (ECB) could not contain it. It was hampered both by its inability to meddle in national sovereignty, and German financial culture. This second bit was a major source of Europe's prolonged crisis. Germany's economy was hot up to and after the crisis. Exports were booming and German banks were doing business across Europe. Germany's good credit was largely keeping the Euro over inflated - Greek bonds were considered as safe as German bonds due to their denomination in Euros. And Germany did not want to foot the bill for others financial "misguidance". Germany espoused a type of tough fiscal prudence - tightening the belt, keeping expenses balanced, and fiscal austerity for the bad actors. This of course did not apply to Germany, which was booming from its export orientated power. Greek sovereign debt? Too bad, German taxpayers won't pay. Angela Merkel strongly resisted any effort to coordinate a financial rescue - instead opting to limit exposure and contagion by imposing harsh terms on the Greek, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian governments. Greek and Italy effectively had their governments removed by the Troika (EU, ECB, IMF) and replaced by technocrats without elections. Wages, benefits, and jobs were slashed to a high degree. The level of austerity was so absurd and ineffective, that Greece's economy was still considered toxic, not due to its bad debt, but to its completely frail economy. The German's went on a rampage of punishment, which did no one good, save for staving off the rise of Germany's far-right AFD and Merkel's survival in the Bundestag. The ECB subscribed largely to this way of thinking. In the US the crisis was largely solved through the use of Fed driven recapitalization schemes, the purchasing of bad bank debt, and large amounts of money promised to restore market confidence. In Europe, the crisis dragged on because the ECB and the EU could not agree on a program of ECB Eurobond issuance. This would infringe on precious national sovereignty, and Germany might be held to account for its exploitative and self-centered economic policies. Eventually, Merkel came around, but only after serious social unrest in Greece, and the election of Far Left parties in Portugal and Greece which subtly (in Portugal) or overtly (in Greece) challenged the Troika. This group came to be seen as monsters for their unflinchingly cold fiscal austerity. Youth unemployment hit record levels in Greece and Spain, and the Italian public lost faith in their technocratic centrists, soon voting in a far right league of parties still in power today. Europe's crisis has left a tainted legacy. The Far Right are on the rise across the Eurozone, with elections in Italy turning in a far right party, and electoral success for nationalists in France, the Netherlands, Austria and more. The UK was largely disappointed with the EU during the crisis. David Cameron and the conservatives sought an exemption from financial transfer taxes for the City of London. When this was denied, they petulantly sought Brexit - an ongoing crisis that may result in the final nail in the City's coffin.

In Eastern Europe the crisis also led to serious upheaval. Debt crisis struck outside the Eurozone - Hungary, Poland, the Baltic's (in the Euro-area) and other nations struggled with debt, and sought IMF emergency packages which led to the usual short sighted fiscal austerity. These nations began to rebel. Hungary elected a far right populist turning Hungary into an illiberal democracy (Orban's words). Poland elected the PiS and began to crack down on judicial and legislative independence. Georgia and Ukraine - seeking greater integration into the EU and Atlanticist world, were forgotten. Russia, scorned by the world in the early 2000's, went hard autocrat and began invasions of first Georgia, then Ukraine in territorial seizures that are unknown in the modern world. Georgia was slapped down, and Ukraine continues to struggle with political decay, separatism, and warfare. The Eurozone was heavily leveraged in Eastern Europe, with many banks heavily investing to modernize the former Soviet worlds economics, and buy up valuable assets on the cheap. This exposure particularly effected banks in Sweden, France, Italy and the Netherlands - and the policy decisions were as varied as the countries involved.

The legacy of crisis from the Great Recession (so dubbed) continues to this day. China continues to exert more clout on the international stage, and is beginning to further reject Western Liberalism as an ideal. Many other countries (Hungary, the US, Poland, Turkey, and more) seem to be following suit. Hard to blame them. The 2008 crisis had no consequences for those that designed its shoddy system. They walked away with massive bonuses. Many of the politicians that worked on the crisis in the US and Europe now work for major financial institutions like Goldman Sachs. This is a prime example of industry capture, and is the main reason behind growing unrest with systems of globalization, free trade, Liberalism, and so on. Traditionally the avenue of the Left, a transcendence of politics has occurred, with the Democratic left in the states largely supporting copratist government protection of big business at the expense of the tax paying poor, with the Tea Party-nationalist right taking over as the main party of anti-globalization. Funny how things change huh?

Tooze's book is fantastic and highly readable. He engages in technical analysis as a way to record history. This fits his thesis, which is politics and economics are intertwined. Clearly, from his account of the crisis, one can see how political motivations (the survival of Merkel's CDP in Germany, the conflict between a growing partisan split in US parties and their inability to resolve conflict effectively etc.) has effected economic decisions (saving the Greek people from crippling austerity, growing the power of the far right, etc.). Discontent continues to be prevalent as we continue to note the predatory nature of the relationship between government and market, and its exploitative effect on individuals and nations across the world. As inequality continues to grow, and we struggle with concepts of secular stagnation, precarious work, roboticization of jobs and so on, Capitals control over every aspect of our lives becomes increasingly clear, and increasingly more unstable. Tooze ponders what would happen if Trump's administration is hit by a financial crisis, noting that it would be much more difficult to come to a bipartisan decision, and that splits within the Republican party could be disastrous. Whatever the case, this is a fantastic read and worthy of the attention of any reader interested in the crisis as history and politics. ...more

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Apr 14, 2020 Julia Damphou rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: economic-history

This is a very impressive and exhaustive book, especially given the recentness of the events and relative lack of publicly available sources.Tooze offers a clear, materialist and mostly political history of the crisis, while also taking pains to explain financial and economic concepts. Provided you take the time in chapter two to understand the economic terminology, the book is not a particularly challenging read. The first part of the book deals with the pre-history of the crisis: mainly geopol This is a very impressive and exhaustive book, especially given the recentness of the events and relative lack of publicly available sources.Tooze offers a clear, materialist and mostly political history of the crisis, while also taking pains to explain financial and economic concepts. Provided you take the time in chapter two to understand the economic terminology, the book is not a particularly challenging read. The first part of the book deals with the pre-history of the crisis: mainly geopolitical events that shaped decision makers choices about how to respond to the crisis. The second part deals with the 2008/2009 crisis as it unfolded, the third about the Eurozone crisis in the following years, and the 4th the ‘aftermath’, changes in world politics since 2015.

Unless you are undertaking a research project on the crisis was a whole, i see very little reason to read this book cover to cover. The table of contents and index are your friends, as individual chapters are a good place to start if you are interested in beginning to learn about specific topics or periods of the crisis. The final quarter of the book, “aftershocks”, has the least clear connection to the crisis itself and given this was published in 2018 you wouldn’t lose much from skipping it entirely.

If there is an over-arching argument to the book it is that ‘simple answers’ about ‘who is to blame’ for the crisis are insufficient or reductive. The point of the book is to meticulously explain what cased the crisis: influence big banks and speculators, political agency of world leaders, short-sighted government policy often governed by ideology, coincidences of geopolitical mis/calculation and so on. The same goes for explaining the varied responses to the crisis. At times this can seem like a somewhat eclectic mix of cause and effect, where at different times it is unclear or unjustified by Tooze why in one place an individual politician’s agency shaped the events, in another an organization's ideology and in another 'structural' factors.

For example, in explaining the crisis in the eurozone Tooze says that while the outcome of the response was influenced and drawn out by German fiscal conservativism, the real fault for Europe’s slow and protracted response lies with overlapping sources of power and democratic decision-making institutions which make it structurally difficult to take swift decisive action. Basically: the response to the crisis in Europe was hindered by lethargy and democratic stalemate, not merely by the malicious influence of german finance. The US fed comes away looking more competent than the eurozone simply because of its ability to respond swiftly, even if the action taken was mainly in the interest of banks and not homeowners. ...more

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Jun 02, 2019 Siah rated it liked it · review of another edition

This is a good book but is suffering from author’s urge to include every single historical event in the book. As a result it’s bloated to become a long, never-ending read. Additionally the author insists on including current events that haven’t been unfolded fully. For example we really don’t know what the impact of Brexit is going to be. Or it is too early to judge the outcome of Trump’s presidency. A better book would have stayed away from including these events. I would have enjoyed this more ...more

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Dec 02, 2018 Christine rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: general-nonfiction, history-general

Honesty, a very good and scary book. Want to understand where we are today? Read this. Despite its length, it is not a slog. It will make you think.

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Oct 15, 2020 Sina Mousavi rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Although I'm somewhat ashamed of myself for how long it took me to finish reading it, the same cannot be said for my decision to read Crashed in the first place. As its title might suggest, this is not just a wonky and technical account of the 2007-08 Global Financial Crisis and its aftershocks. Crashed is rather a much more ambitious project, tracing how the economic, political, and geostrategic implications of the financial crisis have shaped the history of every corner of this planet in the l ...more

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Apr 23, 2020 Ben Edwards rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Was planning on finishing this but now it seems out of date.

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Aug 01, 2020 Indumugi C rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: political-economy, happened-records, academic

If there is one book you'd point out to, to learn about the global financial crisis of 2008 - the storm that gathered it, the decisions made to contain it and the aftershocks of the decisions it will definitely be Crashed. My decision to pick this book was timely, I was free during the pandemic and wanted to learn something important in a comprehensive way. People casually mention the GFC many times, but I never really understood the length and breadth of the crisis. This was my attempt to know ...more

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Nov 30, 2018 Keen rated it liked it · review of another edition

“Let’s hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters :0)”

So said one ratings expert to another in an email back in December 2006. Of course he needn’t have worried, Obama and his buddies on Wall Street would ensure that he looked after all of the money men, way before he even gave a thought to the vast majority of the electorate who voted him in.
Tax, regulation, transparency and accountability are four words which terrify all members of the global financial system.
“Let’s hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters :0)”

So said one ratings expert to another in an email back in December 2006. Of course he needn’t have worried, Obama and his buddies on Wall Street would ensure that he looked after all of the money men, way before he even gave a thought to the vast majority of the electorate who voted him in.
Tax, regulation, transparency and accountability are four words which terrify all members of the global financial system. They prefer words like allowances, opacity, freedom and impunity and that is what they usually get. Tooze’s beastly tome tries to tackle the mess, ten years after it all came down. It is often a cynical and disheartening affair reading about so many egotistical politicians and bankers acting consistently with such naked self-interest, prioritising their own jobs over everything else, but it is certainly an eye-opener.

“The 2006 business year generated $60 billion in bonuses for the finance crowd in New York, and 2007 topped that with $66 billion in bonuses.” In 2007 the six top hedge fund managers earned at least a billion dollars each in compensation. We in the West like to laugh with condescension at so called “Russian Democracy”, which is really not a democracy at all, well the same can be said for the circus of billionaires who run “American Democracy”, their bizarre version in reality is actually somewhere between a plutocracy and a kleptocracy, all bought and paid for by big business, before anyone goes anywhere near a polling station. If there ever was any remaining doubt about this then we only have to look at the action taken during the global financial crisis in the States.

This was all made possible thanks to Barack Obama. Look at his cabinet and how many men were from Wall Street. Look how much money he took from Wall Street during his campaign, even more than the Republicans, and yet he was charged with “sorting out the banks”. He and his cronies (Hillary Clinton took $600.000 from Goldman Sachs in speaking fees) were guilty of a shameless and blatant case of conflict of interest.

What will history say about how Obama fared in comparison to the last people in charge during the last major crash?... Well during the depression of the 30s, Franklin D Roosevelt brought in a number of life- saving and transformative measures under the New Deal. One of the other measures the Democrats implemented was to create the Glass-Steagall legislation of 1933. This created a vital barrier between investment banking and commercial banking. This did a fine job, but it was slowly chipped away in the succeeding decades until Bill Clinton, another Democrat, destroyed it altogether at the end of 1999.

So what did Obama do in comparison?...Well he bailed out companies like AIG, who closed its fourth quarter of 2008 with a loss of $61.7 billion, the largest in US corporate history. Though perhaps the most maddening and sickening factor, is while millions of Americans and others in many countries on many continents were losing their jobs, houses, savings and minds, the men responsible for it all, were not only not being prosecuted, but they were still in the same jobs. So not only did they perpetrate the greatest theft in the history of the world, but they got away with it too, as Tooze shows,

“The bonus season in 2009 was better than ever, netting $145 billion for the executives at the top investment banks, asset managers and hedge funds, as compared with $117 billion in 2008. Goldman made $13.4 billion in profit for its shareholders and paid its own staff $16.2 billion in compensation and bonuses. Astonishingly, even Citigroup, which had a loss of $1.6 billion in 2009 and survived the year only due to government action, paid out $5 billion in bonuses.”

Tooze’s explains at one point that, “All the most severe casualties of the 2008-09 crisis are to be found among the transition economies of the former Eastern bloc.” And apparently for a time in 2009 for the first time in the modern era the movement of the Chinese economy carried the entire world economy. He also elaborates on how countries impact on each other due to the flow of vast amounts of money running through one to another, through trade, borrowing and aid etc, and we see that that money was almost like blood tainted with a virus, which is why so many nations caught it and suffered the horrendous consequences.

After a while the sums of money being thrown about begin to lose all meaning once you start getting into trillions it becomes abstract. It also shows us how much money is being kept by these global institutions and makes you wonder where it all comes from and who has to pay to give it to them in the first place. Later on he also gets into the origins and fallout of the Greece crisis, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Brexit and Trump as well as many other subjects.

I did enjoy this but it was simply too long for my tastes. Although the text was accessible enough I couldn’t really say the same for the many graphs and charts scattered throughout, which I couldn’t always get my head round, though to be fair I did start to lose interest in them after a while. A lot of this has been written about many times before elsewhere. The structure didn’t always seem so assured. Tooze clearly knows his subject in depth and has done a phenomenal amount of research, and I certainly learned a lot, though unfortunately most of it was pretty depressing and merely confirms all the negative stereotypes attributed to leading politicians and the guardians of high finance.
...more

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Sep 29, 2018 Daniel rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

There have been many books about Financial Crisis of 2008, and this is the most comprehensive.

1. Many factors caused the subprime crisis in America. Financial deregulation from faulty ideology, dividing of housing loans into small chunks to be packaged as an investment vehicle and then moving it out of the lending banks, China’s buying of Treasury notes, Bush senior’s push for house ownership, unscrupulous bankers who lies about borrower income, optimism about the Free Market’s ability to solve There have been many books about Financial Crisis of 2008, and this is the most comprehensive.

1. Many factors caused the subprime crisis in America. Financial deregulation from faulty ideology, dividing of housing loans into small chunks to be packaged as an investment vehicle and then moving it out of the lending banks, China’s buying of Treasury notes, Bush senior’s push for house ownership, unscrupulous bankers who lies about borrower income, optimism about the Free Market’s ability to solve all humankind problems, economists who cheered along, all contributed to the crash.

2. Most people were not aware of huge flow of money from Europe into the subprime market. Many middle eastern and some Chinese money go through Europe as well. Thus when the crash came, European banks also failed. After Lehman collapsed, the whole world lost confidence and it was only thanks to the heroic efforts of Paulson, Bernanke and Geithner that the bankers were saved. However, resistance was fierce from some Republicans and in the end Republican leaders with Democrats saved the day. That also meant that helping people who actually lost their homes were politically impossible. Meanwhile bankers continued to award themselves millions of bonus and none were punished. That would come back to haunt the Democrats in 2016. The Fed also extended swap-lines to help its friends in Europe, and some Asian countries including Singapore. That swap line had been extended until now and that is great help because it essentially guarantees that these countries will never run out of the greenback. I am very grateful to the Fed for that. Unfortunately most other countries were not lent this crucial lending hand; Eastern European countries were plunged into severe recession because they had to ask the scary IMF, which had shown devastating to countries that received their aid during the Asian Financial Crisis. It was also telling that when crisis struck, money left countries in trouble and went to America and Treasury. No matter what people say, the American dollar still reigns supreme.

3. When recession struck, at first European countries were oblivious to the swap line that the Fed had extended to their banks. Sarkozy pulled no punches especially. Then the recession pushed a lot of their counties into sovereign crises, Ireland, Greece and Portugal had to be rescued by the dreaded IMF and suffered the punishment of austerity which further increased their debt to GDP ratio. Unemployment in the PIIG countries reached 24%, and youth unemployment doubling that. The more qualified and adventurous youths migrated en mass out of those countries; I remember going to Ireland then and even the fashion magazine was describing the phenomenon of ‘your friends may go out of the country, but hey let’s just have fun anyway!’ This is going to go back to haunt them as well next time when those same working youths are needed to pay for the generous welfare state. Also all these austerity caused people to get angry and vote for extremist parties.

Of note also was German insistence of not allowing Greek debt restructuring, even asking Russia and China to back off from helping it.

4. Russia doubled down, and was first saved by the high oil price. When oil price crashed from the fracking evolution, and sanction from America and Europe, Putin asked the oligarchs to help and it pulled through.

5. The Asian countries including China had learnt their lesson and built up loads of reserve so escaped relatively unscathed.

6. British people were also sick of the rich Londoners that was responsible for the crisis, cheated (LIBOR), yet get richer and richer. This together with the fear of mass migration of Eastern Europeans, Brexit happened and it looks like it is going to be a hard exit. Funny that some in the UK now wants to be the ‘Singapore’ of Europe; however Singapore is located at the strategic Strait of Malacca: Not many shipping pass through the UK....

7. And then there is Trump, who was adept at directing public anger and xenophobia towards his election. He is going to put America first, other countries be damned. We will witness the effects of his tariffs soon enough.

8. China was rocked by the unwinding of the 3 QEs. Money now flows back to America and all the developing countries are under stress as money leaves them back to US. China fortunately managed to severely restrict money flowing out while stimulating the economy and exporting its manufacturing capacity by the Belt and Road initiative. Amazingly Xi now holds the bastion of globalisation and free trade! ...more

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Jan 05, 2019 Charles rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This is an impressive, must-read account of how financial crisis spread from the US in 2007/2008 to become a worldwide crisis enveloping Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America over the following decade. The world has become financially interdependent in a way that challenges our global institutions and indeed our imagination. The linkages of debt and monetary policy are worldwide in scope but the policy instruments to address problems are parochial and nationalistic.

Author Adam Tooze ha ...more

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Feb 08, 2020 Wim rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: history, politics

It takes courage to start reading this massive book. It takes more courage to continue in spite of the detailed descriptions of financial instruments en mechanisms, complex for reading lacking in depth financial knowledge as I do. But it is worthwhile: this book is tremendously insightful.

I have learned so many things through reading this book. It showed how little I understood before, of the financial crisis and the efforts to containment and stabilisation, on the euro crisis and the painful ro ...more

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Aug 21, 2019 Joe Bambridge rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

Crashed is a truly monumental intellectual feat, and Tooze deserves great credit for producing what is to date one of the most comprehensive accounts of the financial crisis, it’s causes, and political fall out. It lacks certain aspects to its analysis, particularly in the second half of the book, to call it truly definitive - see here Durand’s review of Crashed in the NLR - but it certainly sets a marker for any future work on the crisis.

This is a narrative of a crisis of financial capitalism, Crashed is a truly monumental intellectual feat, and Tooze deserves great credit for producing what is to date one of the most comprehensive accounts of the financial crisis, it’s causes, and political fall out. It lacks certain aspects to its analysis, particularly in the second half of the book, to call it truly definitive - see here Durand’s review of Crashed in the NLR - but it certainly sets a marker for any future work on the crisis.

This is a narrative of a crisis of financial capitalism, but if Tooze is seeking to make a point it is that politics - and geopolitics- matter. This may sound obvious, but at the height of the great moderation many prominent elites were arguing that the markets, not politicians, ran the show. Little did they realise that the next crisis would start in financial markets themselves, where banks had come to rely on a highly-leveraged short-term funding model built on instruments derived from the mortgages of millions of American families who had signed up to them under illusion of guaranteed gains.

As this system came to a sudden halt, politicians and central bankers were forced to step in and put out the fires. But success depended on who these people were, their ideologies, the political capital they had, and the geopolitical might they had behind them. Elites in the US could capitalise on the Fed’s position as printer of global currency to save their banks and inject stimulus. China too, through its nexus of party, state, and corporate elite, engineered a response. Between these two, a total collapse was averted. But in the E.U., division and conservative dogma among key players, including Merkel and the ECB, delayed a concerted response and saw Eastern Europe and the periphery states abandoned.

The book is full of fascinating insights, particularly on the less well known but incredibly damaging role played by Merkel&co and the ECB in prolonging the crisis. And, although it sounds ridiculous to suggest, it’s also a useful corrective to analyses which fail to view current crises in their full historical context: before Brexit, the collapse of the UK’s credit-fuelled, property-based model and the role of experts in bailing out the banks rather than the public; before Trump, the foreclosure of millions of homes across the United States; before Orban, the IMF interventions in Hungary and Poland; a sudden reversal in Russian living standards; China’s massive stimulus programme, which rebuilt its cities and invested in technology and allowed the Communist Party to assert its strength.

Tooze also makes reference to some of the revisions in macro-economics that have occurred since the crisis. But he only touches the surface in terms of trying to understand the prolonged malaise of western economies. Obviously, governments which inflicted cutting austerity following the sharpest recession in nearly a century didn’t help. But while Tooze accounts for the dealings between elites that was occurring then with great clarity, he only rarely ventures in to a more structural analysis or attempts to explain how the tensions between the economic and political sphere are transmitted and how they interact with the ‘real economy’ experienced by working class people.

This is not an easy read if you don’t have a background in finance or macro economics. But in itself, that says something about the our present historical moment. If Tooze is correct that ‘history’ is increasingly located in the interventions made by political actors on flows of global capital, what does that mean for the orientation of the left? I don’t think MMT is the answer but monetary politics will increasingly be the ground on which we need to fight. Crashed will be essential reading on this front. ...more

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Nov 02, 2019 Jordan rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This book is extremely dense, but I never thought it was dry, as long as you know what you’re signing yourself up for because it really goes DEEP into the international implications of the recession. Having no library due date would have been helpful because I needed to look up quite a few things while reading to fully understand what was going on, and even then, I’m sure I still missed a lot. Still it was really good, if you’re into this sort of thing! The final questions the book leaves off on This book is extremely dense, but I never thought it was dry, as long as you know what you’re signing yourself up for because it really goes DEEP into the international implications of the recession. Having no library due date would have been helpful because I needed to look up quite a few things while reading to fully understand what was going on, and even then, I’m sure I still missed a lot. Still it was really good, if you’re into this sort of thing! The final questions the book leaves off on are great, and I noted a few other excerpts that I found most interesting:

- - -

“Did the all-our focus on the financial system really serve the interests of the real economy? Was the inability to borrow causing a failure of investment and thus the ongoing depression? Or were the collapsed housing market and cash-strapped households curtailing economic activity such that there was no incentive to invest and thus no demand for loans?
These might seem like academic questions. The bomb was ticketing. The car was hurtling off the bridge. Amid a global catastrophe, did it really matter which way the arrow of causation was pointing? Amid the intensity of the financial crisis, why should anybody care? Because the decision made by the American crisis fighters to take those questions off the table and to give absolute priority to saving the financial system shaped everything else that followed[...] whereas since the 1970s the incessant mantra of the spokespeople of the financial industry had been free markets and light touch regulation, what they were now demanding was the mobilization of all of the resources of the state to save society’s financial infrastructure from a threat of systemic implosion, a threat they likened to a military emergency.” (165)

“Clearly, Wall Street enjoyed a privileged connection to government. After 2008 no one could doubt that[...] Silicon Valley was the new cutting edge of American capitalism. Big Pharma continued to take in profits[...] As the recession of 2008-2009 receded, what came ever more to the fore was a tendency toward concentration and oligopoly that went far beyond Wall Street[...] ‘Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines,” but [Peter] Thiel knew better. As far as he was concerned, ‘[C]apitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition, all profits get competed away. The lesson for entrepreneurs is clear... [c]ompetition is for losers.’” (462)

“The political in ‘political economy’ demands to be taken seriously[...] We suspect technocratic preemption and usurpation around every corner and often with good reason. There are ways of describing the operations of these systems that void the presence of politics. But if history such as this has any purpose, it is to reveal the poverty of such accounts. Political choice, ideology and agency are everywhere across this narrative with highly consequential results, not merely disturbing factors but as vital reactions to the huge volatility and contingency generated by the malfunctioning of the giant ‘systems’ and ‘machines’ and apparatuses of financial engineering.” (615) ...more

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Sep 02, 2018 James Meanwell rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

An excellent work of modern political economy. Adam Tooze covers the antecedents, effects, and fallout of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), through to the electoral turmoil troubling America and Europe in recent years.

There is an enormous amount covered in the book, including the US and European response to the crisis; the fallout on smaller countries incidentally exposed to the crises (e.g. Ireland, Greece, Hungary); the political responses sought and required; the centrality of finance to th An excellent work of modern political economy. Adam Tooze covers the antecedents, effects, and fallout of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), through to the electoral turmoil troubling America and Europe in recent years.

There is an enormous amount covered in the book, including the US and European response to the crisis; the fallout on smaller countries incidentally exposed to the crises (e.g. Ireland, Greece, Hungary); the political responses sought and required; the centrality of finance to these political considerations; and the many failures of policy, too (especially on the European’s part). So it’s very hard to summarize, but I’ll briefly discuss what I think is new, and an enormously valuable contribution.

Tooze’s goes to an enormous amount of trouble to link the economic/financial and political causes and effects of the GFC across multiple world regions. He explains how global finance has flowed through the US and Europe’s mega-banks, in ways that dragged Europe down in 2008, and contributed to the European sovereign debt crises from 2010. He shows how the emergence of China played a role, and the very different responses and outcomes of policy in that country. He also spends quite some time discussing Russia’s position on the periphery of all of these developments.

I was not previously aware of how much of the initial impact of the GFC came from European banks’ reliance on short term dollar funding. The fact that the Crisis emanated from the US, and yet US Treasury bond rates *fell* and the US exchange rate *appreciated* is somewhat puzzling, but this makes perfect sense when one considers how reliant Europe’s (and especially London’s) banking sector was on US dollar borrowing. From 2008, these banks needed *more* US dollars to pay off enormous loans that were quickly coming due. The Federal Reserve System in the US tried to help stabilize the global economy by setting up enormous currency swap lines with those European countries most heavily exposed to the dollar, and these lines were again used throughout the European crisis.

These facts help explain that while the US dollar might have seemed on the brink of losing its dominant currency status prior to 2008 (perhaps to the Euro or the Yuan), its position was massively reinforced by continuing need for funding, and the continuing weakness of non-US bank balance sheets. Indeed, Europe might have weaned itself off dollar-dependence at the same time as strengthening the Euro if it had worked co-operatively to recapitalize banks early on. Tooze makes a pretty convincing case that the failure to do this is almost entirely down to Germany’s reluctance to embrace a European banking union or activist monetary policy on behalf of the ECB. Tooze contrasts this with the (relative) success of US government bank bailouts and the massively monetary stimulus provided by the Fed in the form of the quantitative easing programs.

Overall, an excellent book. Can not recommend it enough. An absolute must-read for social scientists or any general students of the Global Financial Crisis. ...more

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Oct 27, 2019 Anders rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: historie, rusland, kina, usa, diplomati, økonomi

This is one of those rare books that genuinely deserves those breathless blurbs slapped onto bestsellers: "Stunning", "monumental", "insights on every page."
Most of us have the wrong idea about the financial crises of the past decade, and those responsible for the havoc are completely fine with that. The 2008 global crisis wasn't merely the outcome of Wall Street bankers (deeply irresponsible as they were) unloading American-style 'cowboy capitalism' on the rest of the world, but the product of This is one of those rare books that genuinely deserves those breathless blurbs slapped onto bestsellers: "Stunning", "monumental", "insights on every page."
Most of us have the wrong idea about the financial crises of the past decade, and those responsible for the havoc are completely fine with that. The 2008 global crisis wasn't merely the outcome of Wall Street bankers (deeply irresponsible as they were) unloading American-style 'cowboy capitalism' on the rest of the world, but the product of a hugely overgrown, unstable transatlantic system of financial flows in which European financiers and politicians were deeply complicit. The Euro crisis was not the product of 'lazy Greeks' who couldn't pay off their debts, but an ugly, unedifying outgrowth of self-limiting post-Lisbon EU politics, in which Germany was never quite ready to take on leadership, but equally unwilling to let others follow any other path than German-style austerity.

Tooze's training and skill as an economic historian allow him to incisively spell out how the economic disasters of the past decade are deeply interwoven with politics as well as national and personal prejudice at every turn. The grace with hich he guides the reader through the intricacies of Chinese provincial budgets, Wall Street machinations in the US Congress, German centre-right politicking, and everything in between is unlike anything I have seen elsewhere.
At the same time, he does not shy away from a level of technical detail at which many historians would baulk. Although this would normally make it heavy going for readers with little or no economics background, the clarity, thoroughness and well-founded moral outrage of his argumentation add up to an electrifying read.
The combination of 'following the money' through a confusing financialized world with an insistence on the situated, politicized and personalized character of decision-making is the singular strength of this work, which comes highly recommended to anyone who prefers not to be hoodwinked through the next crisis.
...more

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Oct 31, 2018 Mike Clarke rated it liked it · review of another edition

Euro bottom dollar: is globalisation beyond politics? Probably not, argues Adam Tooze in this bonkbuster for economists which is by turns, thrilling, terrifying and torrid. Trump, of course, is part of the answer but so too is Bretton-Woods and the great bail-out for which we are all still paying. Money is a political construct. Brexit? Even though he’s a Brit, it’s a sideshow - “the UK’s effort to ‘take back control’ does not mean everyone else has to fall into line” - although there’s a hair-r ...more

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Oct 04, 2018 David Dayen rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I didn't think there was a lot more to say about the financial crisis, but Tooze fills his book with interesting and new insights on practically every page. The historical distance serves him well here. U.S. reviewers have harped on the one thing that makes domestic policymakers look good - the use of currency swap lines to save foreign countries from ruin - but that's a sliver of the book, and much of the rest is a long indictment against those who facilitated the crisis through deregulation, n ...more

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Nov 04, 2018 John Mihelic rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

having read dozens of books on the financial crisis, and dozens more that touch on it tangentially, Tooze here puts out one of the best. Many of the books that dealt with the crisis were in the first three or four years, so what Tooze benefits here is from some deep reporting but more from the benefit of time. He is able to link the crisis in the North Atlantic with the Euro crisis of several years later and then draw a line that comes with the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump. The h ...more

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