Summary of Crashed

On September 15, 2008, New York investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed. The next day, markets around the world seized. The US Federal Reserve rescued the global economy, writes professor Adam Tooze in this clear, rigorously detailed and exhaustive text. That rescue and the geopolitical changes it wrought have led to an interdependent financial system that, Tooze argues, makes the prospects for coordinated crisis responses all the more unlikely. This impressive work offers readers an overarching and sometimes alarming perspective on the world’s financial future.

Tooze’s layered, far-reaching reportage garnered the Lionel Gerber Prize and recognition as a New York Times Notable Book of 2018, an Economist’s Book of the Year and a New York Times Critics’ Top Book. The Financial Times called this a “monumental narrative history of 10 years that have reshaped our world.” And New York Magazine wrote that Tooze “offers no shortage of penetrating insights into the calamitous epoch we’ve been living through.”