A decade after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the start of the global financial crisis, it is clear that many lessons have been learned, while many economic misconceptions remain embedded in the public consciousness. If economic history teaches us anything, it is to be mindful of our own limitations in a world of infinite uncertainties.
CAMBRIDGE – Ten years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Crashed, by the noted Columbia University historian Adam Tooze, offers a sweeping history of the global financial crisis up to the era of Donald Trump. Above all, it is a scathing critique of the global fiscal-policy response to the crash. To guess the punchline, all one really needs to know is that the word “austerity” appears 102 times without ever being clearly defined. Does austerity mean actually reducing government spending and debt, or simply slowing the rate at which spending and/or borrowing rise? Tooze uses the same term to describe a confusingly wide range of policies and episodes.
CAMBRIDGE – Ten years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Crashed, by the noted Columbia University historian Adam Tooze, offers a sweeping history of the global financial crisis up to the era of Donald Trump. Above all, it is a scathing critique of the global fiscal-policy response to the crash. To guess the punchline, all one really needs to know is that the word “austerity” appears 102 times without ever being clearly defined. Does austerity mean actually reducing government spending and debt, or simply slowing the rate at which spending and/or borrowing rise? Tooze uses the same term to describe a confusingly wide range of policies and episodes.