Crashed: how a decade of financial crises changed the world

In the concluding chapter of Crashed, Adam Tooze argues that the collapse of the US bank Lehman Brothers was one of the defining moments in our collective sense of history. Indeed, everyone has their own story of what they were doing on the morning of 15 September 2008, when Lehman filed for bankruptcy and triggered immense financial instability that reverberated throughout the world. Eleven years have passed, and yet we are still grappling with the impact and the long-term consequences of that event. In this brilliant and very detailed book, Tooze offers a full and enlightening account of the chain of events between that memorable September morning and the world of Brexit and President Trump. At the centre of Tooze's narrative is a question former US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson asked in the run-up to the 2016 presidential primaries: ‘what would have happened if a divisive character such as Trump were president during the 2008 financial crisis?’