Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

The loss of credibility is flagrant and it is comprehensive. The damage goes deep. To say that liberals should simply “pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again,” as the Depression-era song goes, that if America has failed we should look for leadership to a fresh-faced president of France or the relentlessly reliable chancellor of Germany, is either simple-minded or disingenuous. It does no justice to the scale of the disasters since 2008, or to the failure of the lopsided politics prevailing in both Europe and America to offer an adequate response to the crisis. It does no justice to the extent of our political impasse, with the center and the Right having failed and the Left massively obstructed and self-obstructing. Nor does it acknowledge that some losses are irreparable and that sometimes the appropriate response is not just to keep on going but, instead, to linger for a while, to pick over the ruin of our expectations, to tally up the broken identifications and disillusionments.