Book in the news: a useful addition to the library of crisis literature

Book review: Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the WorldAn authoritative study on the causes of the global financial crisis.

906-Crashed-100

Published by Allen Lane (£30)

Buy at Amazon

It's been ten years since Lehman Brothers collapsed, turning what was known as the "credit crunch" into the Great Recession. In that time, we've had the eurozone crisis, Brexit and the rise of populism, and plenty of attempts to analyse the causes of the global financial crisis. Few, however, are likely to match Adam Tooze's book in scope, ambition or rigour, says Duncan Weldon in Prospect.

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The prose is "clear" and the scholarship "remarkable", says Martin Wolf in the FT. Tooze blames an "irresponsible and poorly regulated financial sector" for the crisis, but it wasn't just the fault of American banks "European banks had built up huge dollar liabilities and assets, with nearly all of those liabilities consisting of short-term market borrowing".

"Those like me who have read or written it before might find that there is more narrative than analysis, and that at times that detail can be a little wearying," says David Smith in The Times. And Tooze has "an unnecessarily jaundiced view" of "the period of economic stability and low inflation in the years leading up to the crisis".

Still, the book is clearly "well researched" and Tooze "explains things well, without getting bogged down in technical complexities". All in all, it is "a useful addition to the growing library of crisis literature".

Dr Matthew Partridge

Matthew graduated from the University of Durham in 2004; he then gained an MSc, followed by a PhD at the London School of Economics.

He has previously written for a wide range of publications, including the Guardian and the Economist, and also helped to run a newsletter on terrorism. He has spent time at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and the consultancy Lombard Street Research.

Matthew is the author of Superinvestors: Lessons from the greatest investors in history, published by Harriman House, which has been translated into several languages. His second book, Investing Explained: The Accessible Guide to Building an Investment Portfolio, is published by Kogan Page.

As senior writer, he writes the shares and politics & economics pages, as well as weekly Blowing It and Great Frauds in History columns He also writes a fortnightly reviews page and trading tips, as well as regular cover stories and multi-page investment focus features.

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