Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

Up to the spring of 2013, under the impulse of the Fed’s quantitative easing, dollars flowed even to Ukraine. On April 10, 2013, Kiev turned down the latest offer from the IMF to help finance its gaping current account deficit and instead launched a 1.25 billion eurodollar bond issue, which was eagerly taken up by the markets at the comparatively modest interest rate of 7.5 percent.34 But then Bernanke’s taper pronouncement of May 22 hit the markets. Interest rates surged to 10 percent. Searching for alternative sources of funding and personal enrichment, Yanukovych canvassed the world for options. He explored shale-gas development with Shell and Chevron. In the fall of 2013 a deal was on the books to lease to China an enormous holding of 7.5 million acres of prime farmland—5 percent of the entire land mass of Ukraine, 10 percent of its arable land, an area the size of Belgium. China was not just after Lebensraum. It was also offering to put $10 billion into port facilities in Crimea.35 But it was the talks with the EU