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Saved by the bankers

During the pandemic central banks averted a financial collapse. But they can’t admit how they did it, says Duncan Weldon

Adam Tooze was once best known as a leading economic historian of the 20th century. The Wages of Destruction (2007) represented a major challenge to the conventional understanding of the Nazi war economy, while 2015’s The Deluge re-examined economic changes in the 1920s. Crashed, published in 2018, was his first book of contemporary economic history, covering the financial crisis and its aftermath. Shutdown, his new book, represents another shift, and transforms Tooze from being principally an economic historian to an analyst of contemporary global capitalism. If this is history, it is instant history, assembled not from archives but from journalism, podcasts and Twitter. Such works always run the risk of being a mere collage of snippets and facts. Shutdown, thankfully, avoids that trap. What sets it apart is Tooze’s ability to keep his eye on the big picture—and the long view.

The genius of Crashed was to elucidate the intimate, but previously buried, connections between the banking crisis of 2008 and the Eurozone crisis of 2012-2015. Shutdown is equally illuminating on the events of March 2020—the month when the pandemic triggered a truly global economic crisis. Lockdowns caused a freefall in economic activity, with some of the steepest monthly declines in GDP ever recorded. But unlike in 2008 there is another very different story—that of a financial (as opposed to economic) crisis averted. Importantly, this is not just a story of the west: most emerging market economies were also spared a serious financial crunch. The question is: how was it done?

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Prospect Magazine
October 2021
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