Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

His response was striking. How he voted did not matter, Greenspan declared, because “(we) are fortunate that, thanks to globalization, policy decisions in the US have been largely replaced by global market forces. National security aside, it hardly makes any difference who will be the next president. The world is governed by market forces.”34 This was the mantra of an age of globalization without alternatives. Of course, Greenspan didn’t simply approve of a world governed by market forces, he had done as much as anyone to create it. As Fed chair he had made the markets into the ultimate arbiter of American economic policy. In the early years of the Clinton presidency, he had helped to shepherd the Democrats into a new partnership with Wall Street, thus further limiting the political alternatives on offer. Globalization was not a natural process, opposed to politics. It had been shaped since the 1940s by an alliance of America’s politicians, business elites and policy experts like Greenspan.