Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

Clearly, Wall Street enjoyed a privileged connection to government. After 2008 no one could doubt that. But what was striking in the aftermath of the crisis was how critical commentary on America’s political economy widened its scope beyond the banks. In so doing it followed the evolving contours of the economy itself. With the advent of the smartphone and social media boom in 2007, tech had regained the luster it had lost in the dot-com crash. Silicon Valley was the new cutting edge of American capitalism. Big Pharma continued to rake in profits. As oil prices resurged from their lows in 2009, big oil and the new technology of fracking were back. 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. One of the side effects of Bernanke’s QE policy of low interest rates was that it made it hugely attractive for companies to borrow to buy out their competitors. In three giant merger waves, cresting in 2000, 2006 and 2015, with the antitrust authorities looking on, American capitalism remade itself in a more concentrated and monopolistic mode.36 By 2013 profits were booming to an almost embarrassing extent.37 Even chronic loss makers, like the airlines, were now making money. But the really big