Crashed Quotes

“As billionaire investor Warren Buffett famously put it: “Actually, there’s been class warfare going on for the last 20 years, and my class has won.”
― Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

“life expectancy among working-class white Americans had been decreasing since the early 2000s. In modern history the only obvious parallel was with Russia in the desperate aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. One journalistic essay and academic research paper after another confirmed the disaster, until the narrative was capped in 2015 by Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s famous account of “deaths of despair.”
― Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

“Back in 2007, former Fed chair Alan Greenspan had been asked by the Zürich daily Tages-Anzeiger which candidate he was supporting in the upcoming presidential election. 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.”
― Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

“Political choice, ideology and agency are everywhere across this narrative with highly consequential results, not merely as disturbing factors but as vital reactions to the huge volatility and contingency generated by the malfunctioning of the giant “systems” and “machines” and apparatuses of financial engineering.”
― Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

“What we went through on interminable conference calls in fancy office buildings obviously did not compare with the horrors of war, but ten minutes into the movie I knew I had finally found something that captured what the crisis felt like: the overwhelming burden of responsibility combined with the paralyzing risk of catastrophic failure; the frustration about the stuff out of your control; the uncertainty about what would help; the knowledge that even good decisions might turn out badly; the pain and guilt of neglecting your family; the loneliness and the numbness.”82”
― Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

“When Germany and Russia signed the first Nord Stream pipeline deal in 2005, enormously increasing the flow of Gazprom's gas to the West, it was denounced by Poland’s foreign minister as a second coming of the Hitler-Stalin Pact that had sealed Poland’s fate in 1939. When Moscow tweaked Ukraine’s gas prices over the winter of 2005-2006, it only confirmed the Poles’ worst fears.”
― Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

“In 2005 joblessness would peak at 10.6 percent. To combat this scourge, between 2003 and 2005 the Schroeder government announced a national restructuring program titled Agenda 2010. Its main thrust was a multiphase program of labor market liberalization and benefit cuts, designed by a committee headed by VW’s head of human resources, Peter Hartz. The fourth and final phase of cuts, Hartz IV, became synonymous with a new German “reform” narrative. The unemployed were returned to work. Wage restraint restored German competitiveness. The reward came already in 2003 when Germany could boast of being the world export champion (Exportweltmeister).
Agenda 2010 would come to define a new bipartisan self-understanding of Germany’s political class. Having accomplished the enormous task of reunification, Germany had overcome its internal difficulties and “reformed” its way back to economic health. It is a narrative that is superficially compelling and it would have significant implications for how Berlin approached the crisis of the eurozone, but it does not withstand close scrutiny. Hartz IV certainly drove millions of people more or less willingly off long-term unemployment benefits into a range of insecure jobs. This helped to hold down wages for unskilled workers, such as cashiers and cleaning workers. In the first ten years of the euro, despite soaring productivity, half of German households experienced no wage growth at all. This shortened unemployment rolls. It also increased pretax inequality and lowered Germany’s wages relative to its European neighbors. But as to the competitiveness of German exporters, the significance of Hartz IV is far less obvious. German companies do not win export orders by shaving the wages of unskilled workers. A far more important source of competitive advantage came from outsourcing production to Eastern Europe and Southern Europe. Added to which there was the boost from the global recovery of the early 2000s.
While its economic impact has been exaggerated, what Hartz IV did transform was German politics. The blue-collar electorate and the left wing of the SPD never forgave Schroeder for Hartz IV.”
― Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

“By 2008 the Bush administration had lost the battle. And the financial crisis clinched the impression of disaster. It was a stark historical denouement. In the space of only five years, both the foreign policy and the economic policy elite of the United States, the most powerful state on earth, had suffered humiliating failure. And, as if to compound the process of delegitimatization, in August 2008 American democracy made a mockery of itself too. As the world faced a financial crisis of global proportions, the Republicans chose as John McCain's vice presidential running mate the patently unqualified governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, whose childlike perception of international affairs made her the laughingstock of the world. And the worst of it was that a large part of the American electorate didn't get the joke. They loved Palin.”
― Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

“According to BIS data, professionally managed funds increased their stake in emerging market equity and bonds from $900 billion to $1.4 trillion between 2008 and 2014.11 Set against global totals running into the tens of trillions, those were not huge numbers. But they were comparable to the stock of toxic subprime assets, which had caused such havoc in 2007–2008, and to the debts of Greece, Spain and Ireland, which had destabilized the eurozone in 2010–2012. After subprime and after eurozone sovereign debt, were emerging markets to be the next volume in the “trilogy” of debt crises?12”
― Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

“If there was to be a sudden wave of withdrawals, the small size of emerging financial markets would amplify the stampede effect.10”
― Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

“importance of the interaction of interest rate and exchange rate movement see B. S. Bernanke, “Federal Reserve Policy in an International Context,” IMF Economic Review 65.1 (2017), 5–36.”
― Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

“Geithner went to the well-connected investment bank Warburg Pincus. Bernanke advises the Citadel hedge fund and chaired an advisory board for the giant PIMCO bond fund, owned by Allianz of Germany, which also included as its members Jean-Claude Trichet and Gordon Brown as well as Anne-Marie Slaughter of the Obama foreign policy team.34 It was like a mini reunion of 2008 crisis fighters.”
― Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

“In 2005 two thirds of the mortgages contained in Lehman’s issuance of $133 billion in MBS/CDO were sourced from its own subprime loan originators. A top Wall Street name was scraping the very bottom of the credit barrel.”
― Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

“It is a deep irony that the era in which America is commonly thought of as leading the world in a market revolution saw its housing market become dependent on a government-sponsored mortgage machine descended from the New Deal.”
― Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World