Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

America’s celebrity economists of the center-left, headed by Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, threw their weight behind Varoufakis’s call for a “rational” debt program for Greece. But none of this went down well in Berlin. Nor did Athens get much sympathy from Obama’s new Treasury secretary, Jack Lew. A lawyer, hedge fund manager and Citigroup alumnus, Lew came from the hawkish side of the Obama administration. A new Greek crisis “would not be a good thing in a world economy just recovering from a deep recession,” Lew pointed out. It was up to the Greek government to do its best to win its creditors’ trust.40 As tension escalated in April, Jason Furman, the latest chairman of Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, weighed in to comment that a Greek crisis was not “an experiment we want to run.” But when he was asked to rank a disorderly Greek exit on a “scale of one to 10, where the collapse of Lehman is a 10,” Furman opined that “a Greek default would likely register as a six; that is down from eight in 2012.”41 When the stakes had been high, Washington had not hesitated to meddle in the politics of the euro area. For a crisis that registered only 6 out of 10, Washington was not about to jeopardize its relationship with Berlin. As one American