Crashed

Focusing on the financial crisis of 2008 Adam Tooze’s book shows the transition from a geopolitical to a geo-economic world order in which the political destiny of old nation states is determined by the needs of international financial industry – including the rearrangement of global governance and the erosion of democracies.

I admire the way in which Adam Tooze demonstrates the entanglement between financial capitalism, crises, and the rise of populist and right-wing movements in Europe and the US.

The economic origins of our contemporary woes lie, of course in the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008. Tooze’s summary of the sub-prime crisis in the US housing market is worth the price of the book alone, and he upturned my understanding of the GFC as originating in the global savings glut. His argument also echoes themes discussed above – how international order is shaped around institutions that are internal to the state but that end up bursting across its boundaries – specifically, how the Fed became the de facto central bank for the world through institutions such as the… show more.

This book was a fortunate complement to the theme of my own book, and exceeds everything else written about the financial crisis of 2007-9 in its integration of finance as well as European and American decision-making. I suspect it will need further editions as more documentary evidence comes into the public domain, but already it stands as a polite but severe commentary on the memoirs of various actors.