Crashed
Crashed is 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. 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. Crashed 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
“[A] monumental narrative history of 10 years that have reshaped our world...Crashed gives readers a detailed and superbly researched account of the origins and consequences of the wave of financial crises that emanated from the core of the global financial system from 2007. The prose is clear. The scholarship remarkable. Even people who have followed this story closely will learn a great deal.”
— Martin Wolf, The Financial Times
"Brexit, Trump, Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and China’s ever-escalating role in the financial system: Tooze covers them all and much more, in a volume that’s as lively as it is long — which is to say very, on both counts...Tooze has made a specialty of financial collapse and historical disaster. He also understands the language of corporate balance sheets and sovereign debt deeply enough to know that he ought to use it sparingly, translating some of the most byzantine gibberish into elegant English."
— The New York Times
“There have been many, many books about the financial crisis, but few, if any, have treated it as a world-wide event...This is economic history on an epic scale, and readers who persevere through the book’s roughly 600 pages of text will find many surprises...Mr. Tooze has written a valuable book about the challenges of managing a tightly connected world economy. The questions he raises reconate in the Age of Trump.”
— The Wall Street Journal
"A compelling new book has arrived which deserves to be at the top of the reading list of anyone interested in the events of 2008 and eager to make sense of the aftermath...Combines simple explanations of complex financial concepts with a majestic narrative tracing the prehistory and destructive path of the crisis across the planet."
— The Guardian
"Tooze’s new history of the 2008 crisis and its aftermath offers no shortage of penetrating insights into the calamitous epoch we’ve been living through."
— NYMag.com
"[Tooze] brings a historian’s understanding to the financial crisis and its aftermath . . . The result is an ambitious narrative which runs from the United States, through Western Europe into Central Europe, across the steppes of Russia and onwards to China."
— Reuters
"Bold . . . At the heart of [Crashed] lies a paradox: even though the financial crisis exposed the failings of the American economic model, its aftermath has underscored America’s continuing economic pre-eminence . . . The good thing about Crashed is that it allows for the possibility of American regeneration. Like any sophisticated history, it acknowledges that human agency matters; political and economic forces may shape context but outcomes are not predetermined."
— Sebastian Mallaby, Evening Standard (UK)
"[An] intelligent and persuasive account of the global economy since the U.S. mortgage market exploded into a border-jumping financial conflagration."
— Strategy+Business
"Likely to stand the test of time as the best history of 2008 written in its immediate shadow . . . As the 10th anniversary of the fall of Lehman Brothers approaches, many books on the financial crisis will be published. Few are likely to match Adam Tooze’s Crashed in scope, ambition or rigour. This is truly contemporary history—the book runs right up to the end of 2017. It is hard to think of another author who can write as authoritatively on such a wide range of subjects."
— Prospect Magazine
"Tooze presents a grand unified theory of how we woke up to a world in seemingly headlong retreat from the liberal, democratic, free-trading, ever more prosperous globalized order the West broadly promised at the end of the Cold War."
— Foreign Policy
"Tooze makes the arcana of international economic policy relevant to a lay audience by framing his account with Donald Trump’s political ascension . . . 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."
— Publishers Weekly