Shutdown Quotes

“Many retrospective accounts of collective solidarity of World War II are egregiously sugarcoated.”
― Adam Tooze, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy

“that states have often passed laws against fortune-tellers and prophets of doom.”
― Adam Tooze, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy

“What has made central bankers into the exemplar of modern crisis-fighting is the vacuum created by the evisceration of organized labor, the absence of inflationary pressure, and more broadly, the lack of antisystemic challenge.”
― Adam Tooze, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy

“Despite the successful suppression campaign in February, the coronavirus crisis of 2020 could easily have been a major liability for Xi's regime. Instead, it became an occasion for what has been aptly termed "disaster nationalism," an opportunity to demonstrate collective resilience under the leadership of the party.”
― Adam Tooze, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy

“Such comparisons with the mid-century heyday of Keynesianism no doubt help to capture the drama of the moment. They express the wish of many, on the left as well as the right, to return to that moment when the national economy was first constituted as an integrated and governable entity. As the interconnected implosion of demand and supply demonstrated, macroeconomic connections are very real. But as a frame for reading the crisis response in 2020, this retrofitting risks anachronism. The fiscal-monetary synthesis of 2020 was a synthesis for the twenty-first century.5 While it overturned the nostrums of neoliberalism, notably with regard to the scale of government interventions, it was framed by neoliberalism’s legacies, in the form of hyperglobalization, fragile and attenuated welfare states, profound social and economic inequality, and the overweening size and influence of private finance.”
― Adam Tooze, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy