Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

In the immediate aftermath of Syriza’s victory Obama again sounded encouraging.38 Too much should not be asked of a people that were already on their knees, the president opined. “You cannot keep on squeezing countries that are in the midst of depression.”39 Meanwhile, 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.