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Crashed
Cover of Crashed
Crashed
How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World
Borrow Borrow
WINNER OF THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018
ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR
A NEW YORK TIMES CRITICS' TOP BOOK

"An intelligent explanation of the mechanisms that produced the crisis and the response to it...One of the great strengths of Tooze's book is to demonstrate the deeply intertwined nature of the European and American financial systems."—The New York Times Book Review

From the prizewinning economic historian and author of Shutdown and The Deluge, an eye-opening reinterpretation of the 2008 economic crisis (and its ten-year aftermath) as a global event that directly led to the shockwaves being felt around the world today.

We live in a world where dramatic shifts in the domestic and global economy command the headlines, from rollbacks in US banking regulations to tariffs that may ignite international trade wars. But current events have deep roots, and the key to navigating today’s roiling policies lies in the events that started it all—the 2008 economic crisis and its aftermath. Despite initial attempts to downplay the crisis as a local incident, what happened on Wall Street beginning in 2008 was, in fact, a dramatic caesura of global significance that spiraled around the world, from the financial markets of the UK and Europe to the factories and dockyards of Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, forcing a rearrangement of global governance. With a historian’s eye for detail, connection, and consequence, Adam Tooze brings the story right up to today’s negotiations, actions, and threats—a much-needed perspective on a global catastrophe and its long-term consequences.
WINNER OF THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018
ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR
A NEW YORK TIMES CRITICS' TOP BOOK

"An intelligent explanation of the mechanisms that produced the crisis and the response to it...One of the great strengths of Tooze's book is to demonstrate the deeply intertwined nature of the European and American financial systems."—The New York Times Book Review

From the prizewinning economic historian and author of Shutdown and The Deluge, an eye-opening reinterpretation of the 2008 economic crisis (and its ten-year aftermath) as a global event that directly led to the shockwaves being felt around the world today.

We live in a world where dramatic shifts in the domestic and global economy command the headlines, from rollbacks in US banking regulations to tariffs that may ignite international trade wars. But current events have deep roots, and the key to navigating today’s roiling policies lies in the events that started it all—the 2008 economic crisis and its aftermath. Despite initial attempts to downplay the crisis as a local incident, what happened on Wall Street beginning in 2008 was, in fact, a dramatic caesura of global significance that spiraled around the world, from the financial markets of the UK and Europe to the factories and dockyards of Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, forcing a rearrangement of global governance. With a historian’s eye for detail, connection, and consequence, Adam Tooze brings the story right up to today’s negotiations, actions, and threats—a much-needed perspective on a global catastrophe and its long-term consequences.
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    Chapter 1

     

    The "Wrong Crisis"

     

    On April 5, 2006, the youthful junior senator from Illinois Barack Obama took time out from discussion of an India nuclear deal on Capitol Hill to attend the opening of a new think tank project at Brookings. The Brookings Institution is widely regarded as the most influential social science research center in the world. Obama's Brookings appearance was an audition that would define his presidency. The keynote he delivered was for a new initiative-the Hamilton Project-launched by Robert Rubin, one of the kingmakers of the Democratic Party. Rubin personified the link forged in the 1990s between centrist Democrats and globally minded bankers that reshaped the American economic policy agenda. In 1993 Rubin had moved from his position at the top of Wall Street, as cochairman at Goldman Sachs, to serve as the first head of the National Economic Council, which Bill Clinton had called into existence as a counterpart to the National Security Council. Two years later Rubin was appointed Treasury secretary. Alongside Rubin presiding over the Brookings meeting in April 2006 was a youthful economist by the name of Peter Orszag, also a veteran of the Clinton administration, who would go on to become Obama's budget director. It was from among the veterans of Rubin's Treasury that Obama would recruit virtually his entire economics team in 2008. Twelve months ahead of the financial crisis, two and a half years before Obama took office, the launch of the Hamilton Project presents the worldview of some of his most influential advisers in microcosm. It reveals both what they could see and what they could not.

     

    I

     

    Having returned to the business world in 1999, Rubin was worried about the drift in Washington. Globalization had been the central challenge of the 1990s. In the new millennium it was even more so. But two years into President Bush's second term, the policies of the Republican administration were putting America at risk. Rather than mitigating the pressures of global competition, they were dividing American society. This risked provoking both an antiglobalization backlash and a catastrophic financial crisis that would call into question America's monetary stability and the global standing of the dollar.

     

    Not that Rubin and his circle were doing badly out of a world of globalization. After the Treasury, Rubin had retired to an influential sinecure as a nonexecutive chairman of the board at Citigroup. Orszag, who started his career bouncing back and forth among academia, government and consulting, would in due course end up at Citigroup too. But for average Americans the story was different. There had been good moments. The Clintonites still celebrated the 1990s and the twin booms of tech and Wall Street. But since the 1970s wages had not kept up with productivity. For the meritocrats of the Hamilton Project it was clear where the finger of blame pointed. America's schools were failing to give its young people the education essential to stay ahead of the game. The first reports issued by the Hamilton Project bristled with proposals to improve the recruitment of teachers and make better use of kids' summer vacations. It was the kind of nuts-and-bolts, "evidence-based," nonideological approach to productivity improvement that dominated economic policy discussion of the era. Its purpose, however, was eminently political. As Obama put it in his keynote:

     

    "When you invest in education and health care and benefits for working Americans, it pays dividends throughout every level of our economy. . . . I think that if you polled many of the people in this...

Reviews-
  • Publisher's Weekly

    May 21, 2018
    Columbia history professor Tooze (The Deluge) recounts and analyzes the continuing repercussions of the 2008 economic crisis in this dense, but accessible, book. Although he presents more information than most readers will require (including a chart titled, “Demand for Dollar Funding in the European Central Bank’s One-Month Auctions”), Tooze makes the arcana of international economic policy relevant to a lay audience by framing his account with Donald Trump’s political ascension. He walks through the significant financial crises of the previous 10 years, not neglecting those possibly less familiar to Americans than Lehman Brothers’ collapse, such as the debt crisis in Greece and Ireland. Tooze amasses telling details from the bailout of the big banks (for instance, that they more than doubled their funding advantage relative to small banks after the crisis) to bolster his contention that Trump’s surprise electoral victory was rooted in the U.S. government’s response to the 2008 meltdown. Those government policies gave “absolute priority to saving the financial system” and disregarded “the arrow of causation,” reshaping American politics and setting the stage for a populist backlash. In addition to making international economics understandable and attention grabbing, Tooze has written an essential addition to the ranks of histories that place Trumpism in context.

  • Library Journal

    July 1, 2018

    Wolfson Prize winner Tooze looks at the 2008 economic crisis, which not only reconfigured financial markets worldwide but led to political destabilization, with war in Ukraine, upheaval in Greece, Brexit, and more. Did it have to happen? And does a ripple effect continue?Debut novels from authors who have won prizes for their short fictionCoauthored chills that will keep you reading long into the summer night

    Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

  • Library Journal

    Starred review from July 1, 2018

    Tooze (history, Columbia Univ.; The Deluge) combines an economic history with geopolitical analysis of the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent decade. After detailing the preceding economic climate of a roaring housing market, financial deregulation, and emerging Eastern European economies, the author recounts how those responsible struggled to contain multiple crises in the transatlantic dollar-based financial system, the Eurozone, and post-Soviet Eastern Europe. Resulting government budget deficits brought pressure to impose austerity too early, which made the recovery agonizingly protracted and incomplete. The author goes on to elaborate on the impact of internal politics on government responses and how global markets forced policy decisions on governments, encompassing the Lehman failure, Greek debt, the Ukraine crisis, Brexit, nationalism, protectionism, wealth inequity, the 2015 Chinese market sell-off, and belligerent populism as voiced by President Trump. In sum, the decade's crises came suddenly and with those in charge wholly unready. VERDICT An important and insightful work that, while eminently readable, is most suitable for informed readers wanting an in-depth treatment of the subject. [See Prepub Alert, 2/26/18.]--Lawrence Maxted, Gannon Univ. Lib., Erie, PA

    Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

  • Kirkus

    Starred review from June 1, 2018
    What happens when the walls of Wall Street come crashing down? Donald Trump, for one thing. A long but not oppressive study blending politics, economics, and history.Tooze (History/Columbia Univ.; The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931, 2014, etc.), whose previous book won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, examines the "first crisis of a global age" as it played out in an increasingly interlocked financial world. One driver was the deregulation of financial institutions, which was not confined to the United States. As the author notes, deregulation was central to the British plan to convert London into ground zero for "many of the most fast-paced global transactions" that were remaking the world. Tooze complicates the usual narratives. While many writers, especially on the right, have pegged the financial meltdown on the subprime mortgage crisis, agencies such as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in fact kept loans to high standards, and that aspect of the larger financial crisis proved more symptom than cause. Still, those mortgages worked to distort the market, and "when you distort the market, crises are inevitable." One unintended effect of the rattling of capital was the strengthening of Russia, whose "new prosperity was associated not with independence from the world economy but with entanglement in it," and China, whose economy responded "in directions that the Beijing leadership had been struggling to counteract." Some of the broader consequences were more profound, including a schism between globalists and protectionists in the U.S. and Europe--a schism that, by Tooze's account, resulted a decade later in Brexit, the election of Trump (whose "objectionable personality and outlandish policy proposals now had to be weighed against the more basic political question of who could do what for whom"), and the rush to once again deregulate the very forces that had set off the crisis in the first place.First-rate financial history and an admirable effort to wrestle a world-changing series of events between covers.

    COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World
Adam Tooze
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