Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

Toward the end of 2008 the Atlantic magazine garnered an interview with a fast-talking manager of China’s sovereign wealth fund.4 The result was a startling insight into a topsy-turvy world. Over recent months, Gao Xiqing remarked, the world had watched as America, “after months and months of struggling with your own ideology, with your own pride, your self-righteousness,” had finally applied “one of the great gifts of Americans, which is that you’re pragmatic.” The Fed and the Treasury had intervened on a massive scale to stabilize the financial economy, so now, Gao quipped, when the Chinese looked to the United States, what they saw was not capitalist democracy, but “socialism with American characteristics.”