It has now been 15 years since the outbreak of the global financial crisis, long enough for memoirs and professional accounts to start to appear. The process was kickstarted with the publication of Crashed by Adam Tooze in 2018, a much lauded first draft of history. A friend recounts being interrupted by a series of men in expensive suits while reading it in a coffee shop in Princeton shortly after its publication. They wanted to know whether they were in it – and, if so, how they came off. The people involved have an eye to their legacies.
That may include the three authors of this book, which attempts to apply the lessons of the crisis to current problems. Each has a different perspective. One, Mohamed El-Erian is president of Queens’ College, Cambridge and chief economic adviser at the financial giant Allianz. The book recounts how his former employer, the investment management firm Pimco, gamed out the unlikely scenario of Lehman Brothers collapsing in a disorderly fashion, leaving them well positioned to reap rewards for their clients when that actually happened. Another, Michael Spence, is an academic who went from a Nobel prize in economics in 2001 to a position with the private equity firm Oak Hill Capital and a senior fellowship at the free market Hoover Institution. The third, Gordon Brown, is the most familiar. As prime minister, he hosted a G20 summit in London at the height of the crisis in March 2009, convincing the gathered powers to “flood financial markets with cash” to the tune of $1.1tn.
