Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

only amplified and intensified since? In foreign policy circles the beginning of Obama’s second term saw an impassioned argument over American retrenchment and the foundations of its international power.69 And in economic policy too there were skeptics. Had enough really changed to make another crisis less likely? Had the tensions within the financial system really been resolved, or merely contained? If another Great Depression had been avoided, did that have the perverse effect of removing the spur to truly profound reform?70 It was not without irony that among the Cassandras one of the loudest and most compelling voices was none other than Larry Summers, Treasury secretary to Clinton and chief economic adviser to Obama until December 2010. Twelve months on from Obama’s second election victory, at an IMF event in November 2013, Summers warned: “[M]y lesson from this crisis, and my overarching lesson, which I have to say I think the world has under-internalized, is that it is not over until it is over, and that time is surely not right now.”71 He could not have known how right he would turn out to be.