瞿宛文的部落格Bait and Switch: Review of “Crash: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World”
Simon Wren-Lewis
Review of “Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World” by Adam Tooze
Allen Lane, 706 pp, £30.00, August, ISBN 978 1 84614 036 5
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n20/simon-wren-lewis/bait-and-switch?from=groupmessage&isappinstalled=0
In Crashed, Adam Tooze sets himself the mammoth task of making sense of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and its consequences over the last ten years. By and large he succeeds brilliantly.
Although US policymakers succeeded in preventing an outcome worse than the Depression, they did so by fixing Wall Street much more than Main Street. There was modest growth after the crisis, but much of it went to the 1 per cent, not the 99 per cent. Main Street suffered even more in Europe, with a second Eurozone recession caused by austerity; in the UK austerity also led to the weakest economic recovery in at least a hundred years. All this provided the fuel for populism to emerge as a serious political force. Is there anything in the GFC and the reaction to it that can help us understand why populism should have emerged in the form of Trump and Brexit? The implementation of austerity in the wake of the GFC involved denying help to millions of people.