Ten years after the 2008 crash, we now have a synoptic account of the politics and economics of the last decade.

In Crashed: How A Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, Adam Tooze, a Columbia economic historian whose previous work explored the wartime Nazi economy and America’s emergence as an economic global power, surveys the political economy of the post-Lehman era — scrutinizing not just the bank bailouts and the eurozone crisis, but everything from the fate of South Korea’s chaebol to the Russian-NATO proxy war in Ukraine to America’s social crisis in the age of Trump.

Tooze’s account is unique in its understanding of the financial mechanics of the crisis, the first systemic breakdown of the new securitized, post–Bretton Woods financial system. Drawing on the innovative work of “macrofinancial” economists like Hyun Song Shin or Perry Mehrling, Tooze meticulously surveys the new landscape of crisis — one in which classic images of queues of panicked bank depositors are replaced by postmodern “runs on repo.”