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97 Foreign Aff. 199 (2018)
The Forgotten History of the Financial Crisis: What the World Should Have Learned in 2008

handle is hein.journals/fora97 and id is 1039 raw text is: The Forgotten History of the Financial Crisis What the World Should Have Learned in 2008 Adam Tooze eptember and October of 2008 was the worst financial crisis in global history, including the Great Depression. Ben Bernanke, then the chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, made this remark- able claim in November 2009, just one year after the meltdown. Look- ing back today, a decade after the crisis, there is every reason to agree with Bernanke's assessment: 2008 should serve as a warning of the scale and speed with which global financial crises can unfold in the twenty-first century. The basic story of the financial crisis is familiar enough. The trouble began in 2007 with a downturn in U.S. and European real estate markets; as housing prices plunged from California to Ireland, home- owners fell behind on their mortgage payments, and lenders soon began to feel the heat. Thanks to the deep integration of global banking, securities, and funding markets, the contagion quickly spread to major financial institutions around the world. By late 2008, banks in Bel- gium, France, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Spain, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States were all facing existential crises. Many had already collapsed, and many others would before long. The Great Depression of the 1930s is remembered as the worst economic disaster in modern history-one that resulted in large part from inept policy responses-but it was far less synchronized than the crash in 2008. Although more banks failed during the Depression, ADAM TOOZE is Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University, where he directs the European Institute, and the author of Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World. September/October 2018 199

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