Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

One could hardly ask for a more crass statement of robber baron hubris. The implications were bleak. America’s massively skewed distribution of income and wealth was the product of inherited assets, amplified by pervasive technological and economic change and Warren Buffett’s “class war,” which extended to every facet of the political regulation and deregulation of the economy. If this was so, what would it take to counteract the imbalance and to redress the astonishingly one-sided outcomes? A polite European social democrat like Thomas Piketty inferred from his inequality data that what the world needed was a global wealth tax. This was the message of his remarkable global bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which redefined the public debate about inequality in 2014.42 That would certainly help to offset the tendency toward massive inequality. But in a system as starkly polarized and lopsided as that of the United States,