Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

Nor was it only Americans in London. European politicians and cultural critics might be skeptical of freewheeling “Anglo-Saxon” finance. But this downplays the extent to which Europeans coconstructed global finance. From the 1980s onward, Swiss, German, French and Dutch banks began to buy into the City of London with aggressive acquisitions. It was, more often than not, their springboard for a venture into US markets. In 1989 Deutsche Bank acquired Morgan Grenfell Group before buying Bankers Trust in the United States in 1999, and Scudder Investments, a US asset management firm, in 2002. Shortly thereafter, Germany’s leading bank declared English to be its official working language. Credit Suisse was unusual in starting with the acquisition of First Boston in 1990 before reorganizing itself as CSFB in 1996–1997, the same year that it acquired the London firm BZW from Barclays. Germany’s Dresdner Bank bought Kleinwort Benson in 1995 before buying the small but highly influential New York investment bank Wasserstein Perella in 2001. In the 1980s City of London insider Hoare Govett sold out to Security Pacific before being snapped up by the expansive Dutch bank ABN AMRO, which would become the leading European issuer