Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World with Adam Tooze

This is a production by the National History Center in cooperation with the Woodrow Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program in Washington DC

In September 2008 the Great Financial Crisis, triggered by the collapse of Lehman brothers, shook the world. A decade later its spectre still haunts us. As the appalling scope and scale of the crash was revealed, the financial institutions that had symbolized the West’s triumph since the end of the Cold War, seemed – through greed, malice and incompetence – to be about to bring the entire system to its knees.

Crashed is an original analysis of what happened and how we were rescued from something even worse – but at a price which continues to undermine democracy across Europe and the United States. Gnawing away at our institutions are the many billions of dollars which were conjured up to prevent complete collapse. Over and over again, the end of the crisis has been announced, but it continues to hound us – whether in Greece or Ukraine, whether through Brexit or Trump.

Adam Tooze is the author of Wages of Destruction, winner of the Wolfson and Longman History Today Prize. He is the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University. He formerly taught at Yale University, where he was Director of International Security Studies, and at the University of Cambridge. He has worked in executive development with several major corporations and contributed to the National Intelligence Council. He has written and reviewed for Foreign Affairs, the Financial Times, The Guardian, the Sunday Telegraph, The Wall Street Journal, Die Zeit, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Tageszeitung and Spiegel Magazine, New Left Review, and the London Review of Books.

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is sponsored jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and the George Washington University History Department for their support.