Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

From a prizewinning economic historian, 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.
In September 2008 President George
Bush could still describe the financial crisis as an incident local to
Wall Street. In fact it was 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. In the
United States and Europe, it caused a fundamental reconsideration of
capitalist democracy, eventually leading to the war in the Ukraine, the
chaos of Greece, Brexit, and Trump.
It was the greatest crisis to
have struck Western societies since the end of the Cold War, but was it
inevitable? And is it over? Crashed is a dramatic new narrative
resting on original themes: the haphazard nature of economic development
and the erratic path of debt around the world; the unseen way
individual countries and regions are linked together in deeply unequal
relationships through financial interdependence, investment, politics,
and force; the ways the financial crisis interacted with the spectacular
rise of social media, the crisis of middle-class America, the rise of
China, and global struggles over fossil fuels.
Finally, Tooze asks,
given this history, what now are the prospects for a liberal, stable,
and coherent world order?