Shutdown

July 5, 2021
The real shocker of the Covid-19 virus is not its death toll—there have been deadlier pandemics—it’s “the scale of the response,” writes historian Tooze (Crashed) in this sweeping survey. In what he calls “a comprehensive crisis of the neoliberal era,” nearly 95% of the world’s economies suffered a reduction in GDP, he writes, and the World Bank estimates that the long-term wage loss will be $10 trillion. Month by month, Tooze covers the progression of the pandemic, tracing government action in Wuhan in January and Italy’s response in March as that country went into lockdown, charting the pandemic’s impact on stock markets and on mental health, the divisions in America as the presidential election loomed, the debt faced by the hardest-hit countries, and the race to create a vaccine. A comprehensive history of an unprecedented year, Tooze’s account describes how the pandemic played out politically across the globe, the interplay between climate change and the pandemic, and the myriad effects of the world economy nearly shutting down in a brief period that, as Tooze puts it, made “History with a capital ‘H.’” Readers will find this deeply informed parsing of the pandemic to be illuminating and thought-provoking. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, the Wylie Agency.

July 15, 2021
Economic historian Tooze examines the unprecedented decision of governments around the world to shutter their economies in the face of pandemic. "The virus was the trigger," writes the author. But other elements were at play, including a serious slowing of global economic growth, a rise in nationalist and authoritarian regimes around the world, and what, in effect, was a new cold war with China. In other words, the agents for destabilization were myriad well before Covid-19 arrived. Tooze, a scholarly writer of uncommon clarity, summons from the language of EU economic forecasting the useful word polycrisis to describe this multipronged series of failures of imagination and governance. Whereas the financial crisis of 2008 showed the weakness of the world banking system, Tooze writes, the shock of the pandemic spoke to the weakness of asset markets as a whole, requiring entities such as the U.S. Treasury to assemble "a patchwork of interventions that effectively backstopped a large part of the private credit system." It did not help that the "fascistoid" Trump administration was so inept, though it did help that Steven Mnuchin, "the least 'Trumpy' of the Trump loyalists," led those Treasury efforts. Other economies suffered in even greater proportion, especially that of the U, K, whose structural shortcomings were exposed at just the time the country was departing the EU. Unlike in the crisis of 2008, though, British far rightists, like their American counterparts, had cut their ties with the business community, and the business community responded by rejecting austerity. So it was, Tooze observes, that when Joe Biden assumed the presidency, he pushed for big-dollar measures, which corporations supported, to jump-start the economy--with the proviso, Tooze notes, that Biden drop his push for a $15 minimum wage. Even so, he concludes, it is in the U.S. that "the disharmony between politics and economic and social development is at its most extreme and consequential." As the pandemic hopefully continues to fade, other crises remain. This book is a valuable forecast of future problems.

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August 1, 2021
The entire world has not experienced a collective public health and economic disaster equal to the coronavirus pandemic of 2020. The disastrous public-health, social, economic, and political crises of the past year marked an unprecedented era in human history. Economic historian and professor Adam Tooze analyzes an of-the-moment history set between Xi Jinping's acknowledgement of the COVID outbreak on January 20, 2020 and Joe Biden's election on January 20, 2021. He discusses the ways in which the global environmental crisis has been building to a breaking point of cataclysmic events. In addition to deep analysis into the role central banks played in mitigating the economic fallout of worldwide economic shutdowns, Tooze contextualizes the massive economic and political efforts to address COVID, drawing comparisons with responses to the 2008 recession. While some readers may wonder whether the full impact of 2020 can be understood halfway into 2021, Tooze's sense of urgency in the face of historic upheavals is a compelling argument for the world to prepare for momentous change.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.