Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

As both household consumption and business investment plummeted, of the sixty countries that supply the IMF with quarterly GDP statistics, fifty-two registered a contraction in the second quarter of 2009.67 Not since records began had there been such a massive synchronized recession. Tens of millions of people were thrown into unemployment. Though it was dazed bankers with boxes of belongings stumbling out of office towers in London and New York that attracted the TV cameras, it was young, unskilled blue-collar workers who suffered the worst.68 In the United States, the epicenter of the crisis, the month-on-month fall in employment over the winter of 2008–2009 was breathtaking. In the worst period, the monthly rate of job losses topped 800,000. Among the African American population the surge was particularly dramatic, with unemployment rising from 8 percent in 2007 to 16 percent by early 2010.