Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

in the Hamilton Project agenda. In December 2013, a year into his second term as president, Obama visited a community center in Ward 8, an African American section of Washington, DC, to make a major speech about America’s ongoing social crisis.18 He described the “daily battles” of ordinary Americans struggling against the “relentless decades-long trend” toward “dangerous and growing inequality.” The “basic bargain at the heart of our economy has frayed,” he declared. Of course, the trend toward growing inequality was not confined to America. But, Obama insisted, there must be no more evasion, “this increasing inequality is most pronounced in our country. . . . [S]tatistics show . . . that our levels of income inequality rank near countries like Jamaica and Argentina.” Comparable “wealthy allies, countries like Canada or Germany or France . . . have greater mobility than we do, not less.” Half of all Americans would experience poverty during at least one period of their lives. “The combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American Dream, our way of life and what we stand for around the globe.” Inequality was, the president declared, the “defining challenge of our time.”