Showing results by author "Adam Tooze" in All Categories

An extraordinary mythology has grown up around the Third Reich that hovers over political and moral debate even today. Adam Tooze's controversial book challenges the conventional economic interpretations of that period.

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 symbolised 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.  

In the depths of the Great War, with millions dead and no imaginable end to the conflict, societies around the world began to buckle. The heart of the financial system shifted from London to New York. The infinite demands for men and materiel reached into countries far from the front. The strain of the war ravaged all economic and political assumptions, bringing unheard-of changes in the social and industrial order.

The shocks of 2020 have been great and small, disrupting the world economy, international relations, and the daily lives of virtually everyone on the planet. Never before has the entire world economy contracted by 20 percent in a matter of weeks nor in the historic record of modern capitalism has there been a moment in which 95 percent of the world's economies were suffering all at the same time. Across the world, hundreds of millions have lost their jobs. And over it all looms the specter of pandemic, and death.

Current events have deep roots, and the key to navigating today’s roiling policies lies in the events that started it all — the 2008 economic crisis and its aftermath. 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.

When the news first began to trickle out of China about a new virus in December 2019, risk-averse financial markets were alert to its potential for disruption. Yet they could never have predicted the total economic collapse that would follow in Covid-19's wake, as stock markets fell faster and harder than at any time since 1929, currencies across the world plunged, investors panicked and even gold was sold off.

Spannend wie ein Thriller - Adam Tooze beschreibt unsere Welt im radikalen Wandel. Adam Tooze erzählt in seinem atemberaubenden neuen Hörbuch die Geschichte der zwölf Monate vom Januar 2020 bis Januar 2021. Am Anfang gibt Xi Jinping der Weltöffentlichkeit bekannt, dass sich in China ein neuer tödlicher Virus ausbreitet. Am Ende zieht Joe Biden als Nachfolger von Donald Trump ins Weiße Haus ein. Dazwischen liegen die Schockwellen einer verheerenden Pandemie, die keinen Kontinent, kein Land und keine Bevölkerung ungeschoren lässt.