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Crashed

How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World
Dec 04, 2018
Crashed is a history of the present. This is by far the best book available on the 2008 banking meltdown and its international ramifications over the decade since then. Tooze combines a journalist’s eye for detail with his historian’s ability to understand the larger significance of the patterns of the crises and the governmental responses to it. The book is truly international in its breadth and while it focuses on European, Chinese, British and American roles, it includes shorter analysis of smaller countries and emerging markets. Surprisingly the heroes of the story are the U.S. government elites who basically refloated the entire system by making dollars easily available across the globe and the Chinese whose massive Keynesian investments carried much of the globe with it. Tooze sees that the alternative of a complete collapse would have inflicted such pain as to be unfathomable. Tooze is a left critic who understands the system creates the grotesque inequalities that Piketty has explained. Crashed makes strong arguments correlating globalization of markets and finance and the growing political polarization across the world, the rise of right wing populism and right wing governments as well as a growing left. Tooze doesn’t focus on personality (Trump is hardly mentioned until the penultimate chapter), but on structural and systemic pressures. A large question is left dangling at the book's end. As Tooze argues that the repercussions of the 2008 crises continue to roil the world's economic markets and political stability, it appears that while the immediate disastrous threats of the crash were averted, the contradictions leading to the crash were not resolved. With corporate, personal and governmental debts again inflating quickly, are we due for round two?