Quotes from Adam Tooze

As billionaire investor Warren Buffett famously put it: "Actually, there's been class warfare going on for the last 20 years, and my class has won.

life expectancy among working-class white Americans had been decreasing since the early 2000s. In modern history the only obvious parallel was with Russia in the desperate aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. One journalistic essay and academic research paper after another confirmed the disaster, until the narrative was capped in 2015 by Anne Case and Angus Deaton's famous account of "deaths of despair.

if there was any power in the 1930s and 1940s that exemplified the Fascist slogan of the 'triumph of will' over material circumstances it was not Nazi Germany, or Fascist Italy, but Stalin's Marxist dictatorship.

This scenario of capitalism in its final stage consuming itself in an orgy of imperialist destruction is one of the hallmarks of Lenin's political thinking.

In the fateful last week in September, with Europe poised on the brink of war, a snatch squad apparently stood ready in Berlin to storm the Reich Chancellery and to arrest Hitler and the Nazi leadership.110

The chronic shortage of oil, the debility of the European coal mines and the fragility of the food chain, made it seem unlikely that Germany would in fact be able to 'consolidate' its conquests of 1940 without falling into excessive dependence on the Soviet Union.

The reason why Hitler gambled everything on a massive attack in 1940 was not because he was worried about making excessive demands on the German population, but simply because he thought that this was the only way that Germany could win the war.

Of the growth in total national output in Germany between 1935 and 1938 almost half (47 per cent) was accounted for directly by the increase in the Reich's military spending.15 If we add investment, of which a very large part was dictated either by the priorities of autarchy or rearmament, the share rises to two-thirds (67 per cent).

The aggression of Hitler's regime can thus be rationalized as an intelligible response to the tensions stirred up by the uneven development of global capitalism, tensions that are of course still with us today. But at the same time an understanding of the economic fundamentals also serves to sharpen our appreciation of the profound irrationality of Hitler's project.

Political choice, ideology and agency are everywhere across this narrative with highly consequential results, not merely as disturbing factors but as vital reactions to the huge volatility and contingency generated by the malfunctioning of the giant "systems" and "machines" and apparatuses of financial engineering.

The vast majority of German troops invaded France, Belgium and the Netherlands on foot, with their supplies moved forward from the railheads in the classic nineteenth-century manner, by horse and cart.

It was only in 1893 that Britain had seen fit to upgrade its legation in the American capital to the status of a full embassy. Now, less than a generation later, European history seemed to hang on the posture that Washington would adopt towards the war.

When Germany and Russia signed the first Nord Stream pipeline deal in 2005, enormously increasing the flow of Gazprom's gas to the West, it was denounced by Poland's foreign minister as a second coming of the Hitler-Stalin Pact that had sealed Poland's fate in 1939. When Moscow tweaked Ukraine's gas prices over the winter of 2005-2006, it only confirmed the Poles' worst fears.

importance of the interaction of interest rate and exchange rate movement see B. S. Bernanke, "Federal Reserve Policy in an International Context," IMF Economic Review 65.1 (2017), 5–36.

Too often our knowledge of the extraordinary victories achieved by the Wehrmacht in the summer of 1940 obscures the precariousness of Hitler's situation over the winter of 1939–40.

It was also the Luftwaffe that would be the first to face the terrifying industrial might of the United States.

The best-equipped infantry divisions, numbering 17,700 men, were provided with between 500 and 600 trucks, 390 cars and a similar number of motorcycles. But for the bulk of its transport the German army relied on horses.39 As compared to a wartime complement of 120,000 trucks, mainly drafted from private business, Fromm allowed for 630,700 horses, one animal for every four men in the active field army.

In 2005 two thirds of the mortgages contained in Lehman's issuance of $133 billion in MBS/CDO were sourced from its own subprime loan originators. A top Wall Street name was scraping the very bottom of the credit barrel.

that states have often passed laws against fortune-tellers and prophets of doom.

Many retrospective accounts of collective solidarity of World War II are egregiously sugarcoated.

Reading contemporary sources, there can be no doubt that the Battle of the Ruhr marked a turning point in the history of the German war economy, which has been grossly underestimated by post-war accounts.29 As Speer himself acknowledged, the RAF was hitting the right target.30 The Ruhr was not only Europe's most important producer of coking coal and steel, it was also a crucial source of intermediate components of all kinds.

It is a deep irony that the era in which America is commonly thought of as leading the world in a market revolution saw its housing market become dependent on a government-sponsored mortgage machine descended from the New Deal.

Geithner went to the well-connected investment bank Warburg Pincus. Bernanke advises the Citadel hedge fund and chaired an advisory board for the giant PIMCO bond fund, owned by Allianz of Germany, which also included as its members Jean-Claude Trichet and Gordon Brown as well as Anne-Marie Slaughter of the Obama foreign policy team.34 It was like a mini reunion of 2008 crisis fighters.

given the startling superiority of much of the Red Army's weaponry, the Wehrmacht needed an entire new generation of tanks and infantry weapons.