EP 239 How America Helped Crash the World Economy and Then Save It

While this podcast has done a number of episodes on the financial crisis over a decade ago, because its effects are still felt on our politics today, none of our previous episodes explained the crisis in such global terms as the one you will hear today.  Adam Tooze, author of ‘Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World’, will expand greatly on your understanding of how this meltdown was going on simultaneously throughout a world entangled in its financial covenants and relationships. Shocking to many will be the understanding that it was our Federal Reserve that saved many European banks, including their central banks.  This could have been much worse than the Great Depression. However, because of the extraordinary measures taken by the United States, akin to a military strategy credited to Colin Powell, many of its worst impacts were blunted. Given that Ben Bernancke, head of the Fed at the time, was a scholar of the Depression, perhaps it’s not surprising that he would not allow America to sleepwalk through this crisis as we had in the previous century.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download