Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

About the technical efficacy of the swap lines there was little doubt. Their political legitimacy was a different matter. And in the autumn of 2013 one couldn’t help thinking of another of America’s technical systems of power that had been revealed earlier that year: the NSA’s electronic surveillance network.49 The network that Edward Snowden exposed in early June also centered on US power and technological capacity. It too was no American monolith. Like the Fed, the NSA worked through local agencies. It too promised to provide a blanket of security for the United States and its allies. Of course spying and exchanging currencies were not the same things. But they did have in common that their functional power and administrative efficacy were not matched by anything resembling public political authorization. They were testimony, at one and the same time, to the continuing significance of US global power and the difficulty in justifying that power in public either in the United States or in the countries whose governments and business interests were enrolled in America’s network.