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“... Angela​ Merkel had a bad start to 2019. The right-wing AfD was on the rise. The reaction of the German security services to the race riots in the East German town of Chemnitz had raised questions about right-wing infiltration of the state apparatus. And then came a request from the National Gallery in Berlin for the loan of two pictures that hung in Merkel’s chancellery office ...”

“... and regulation. The liberty of trade was established as something akin to a religion, with Adam Smith and the classical economists as its prophets. In Keynes’s view, such dogmatism, and the rigidity it fostered, were the opposite of what was needed to secure a progressive liberal order. From today’s standpoint, Keynesianism must also be contrasted ...”

“... Wolfgang Schäuble​ can’t have expected an easy ride when he moved from Germany’s Interior Ministry to its Finance Ministry on 28 October 2009. Angela Merkel’s new coalition with the Free Democratic Party (FDP), the free market Liberals, was committed to reducing the government deficit. That summer the preceding Grand Coalition – the name for a coalition involving Germany’s two largest parties, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) – had made use of its large majority to write a self-denying debt brake into the German constitution ...”

“... The carbon clock is ticking. Governments and official agencies assure us that all will be well, that they can balance the risks. Some insist that technology will save us. We have achieved the impossible before, we will do it again. But why believe them? Progress towards decarbonisation has been limited. Fossil fuel interests remain stitched into global networks of power directly descended from the age of imperialism ...”

“... In​ March, as Europe and the US began to apprehend the scale of the Covid-19 pandemic, investors panicked. Financial markets plunged. The rout was so severe that on several occasions in the second and third week of March, normal market functioning was in question. The prices of US Treasuries, the ultimate safe asset for investors all over the world, swung wildly as fund managers, scrambling for cash, sold everything they could sell ...”

“... This year​ is both the 70th anniversary of the formation of the Federal Republic of Germany and the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. For years Germany has been thought of as both the pace-setter and the anchor of European politics. But in the summer of 2019, the political scene in Berlin is in greater flux than at any time since the Second World War ...”

“... Whatever it takes​ .’ These words, spoken by the president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, to a crowd of investors in the City of London on 26 July 2012, have come to represent the symbolic end to the acute phase of the global financial crisis. In the political sphere, by contrast, where words are supposed to be everything, we have not yet been able to draw the line ...”

“... On 13 October​ 1806 a young German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, had an encounter with world history. En route to their annihilation of the Prussian forces 24 hours later, Napoleon and his army were marching through the East German university town of Jena. Hegel couldn’t disguise his terror that in the ensuing chaos the recently completed manuscript of The Phenomenology of Spirit might get lost in the mail ...”

“... What​ Eric Hobsbawm called the ‘short 20th century’ is supposed to have ended in 1989 with the United States winning the Cold War. Yet today America faces a powerful and assertive China, a one-party state with an official ideology it calls 21st-century Marxism, which is busy building a powerful military on the back of an economy set to become the world’s biggest in the foreseeable future ...”

“... Paul​ Krugman’s latest collection of essays, Arguing with Zombies, first appeared in January 2020. Not only was it quickly buried by Covid, but he missed out on a thing all too rare for a pundit: the opportunity to declare victory. A year later, in Joe Biden’s Washington, Krugmanism rules. The gigantic scale of the $1.9 trillion Biden rescue plan, and now the proposed $2 trillion infrastructure investment programme, are testament to a rearrangement of the relationship between economic expertise and politics in the Democratic Party, a rearrangement which Krugman anticipated and for which Arguing with Zombies makes a powerful case ...”

“... and politics was forced back into the picture, though it had never really gone away. In Crashed, Adam Tooze sets himself the mammoth task of making sense of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and its consequences over the last ten years. By and large he succeeds brilliantly. The origins of the GFC are usually traced to the sub-prime housing crash in the ...”

“... political leaders who thought that they could use him and his movement. In The Deluge, Adam Tooze, an economic historian who in 2006 published a wonderful study of the Nazi economy, has set himself the immense task of explaining what went wrong. He also wants to show the intimate relationship between domestic and foreign policies, arguing, for ...”

“... Nazi atrocities and the range of Germans who were involved in them. In The Wages of Destruction, Adam Tooze emphasises Germany’s relative economic weakness compared to that of the British Empire or the United States, making sense of the invasion of the Soviet Union ‘as the last great land-grab in the long and bloody history of European ...”

“... the weird world had been existing at a distance from this central reality of human history. As Adam Tooze points out in his brilliant book Shutdown, 91 per cent of deaths in the contemporary West are from noncommunicable diseases like cancers and strokes and heart attacks, many of them illnesses associated with modern lifestyles. The equivalent ...”

“... professor Liu Qing was ‘coupled’ with the economist Xue Zhaofeng (imagine David Runciman and Adam Tooze playing a warring couple on James Corden’s Late Late Show). Liu now gets stopped in the street by fans asking for autographs and selfies. His showbusiness experience has prompted him to think about how far removed academia is from everyday ...”