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.
Such freewheeling use of a freighted term muddles the discussion at key junctures. More broadly, it is emblematic of an economic analysis that seems to be rooted in a selective reading of left-leaning commentaries rather than primary economic or historical sources, much less a balanced survey of the scholarly literature.
For example, we are told that during the eurozone crisis, Greece was subjected to “the most draconian austerity program ever proposed to a modern democracy.” This would seem to suggest that the “Troika” –the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission – was demanding that Greece immediately pare the overall size of its debts. In fact, the opposite was true. In the years following the crisis, when Greece lost access to fresh money from private markets, the Troika gave the country enough to meet all its payment obligations, plus a significant amount of additional fresh money, thereby reducing the magnitude of austerity it inevitably faced when its borrowing binge ended.
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.
Such freewheeling use of a freighted term muddles the discussion at key junctures. More broadly, it is emblematic of an economic analysis that seems to be rooted in a selective reading of left-leaning commentaries rather than primary economic or historical sources, much less a balanced survey of the scholarly literature.
For example, we are told that during the eurozone crisis, Greece was subjected to “the most draconian austerity program ever proposed to a modern democracy.” This would seem to suggest that the “Troika” –the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission – was demanding that Greece immediately pare the overall size of its debts. In fact, the opposite was true. In the years following the crisis, when Greece lost access to fresh money from private markets, the Troika gave the country enough to meet all its payment obligations, plus a significant amount of additional fresh money, thereby reducing the magnitude of austerity it inevitably faced when its borrowing binge ended.