Crashed presents Adam Tooze's reinterpretation of the 2008 financial crisis as a global event requiring a global understanding. Tooze, professor of history at Columbia and author of previous works on Nazi economics and World War I, brings a historian's perspective to recent events, revealing patterns invisible to journalists covering developments in real time. He argues that what appeared as an American crisis was actually a crisis of transatlantic finance, with European banks more exposed to toxic American assets than their American counterparts. Tooze traces how the crisis spread from Wall Street to European capitals, forcing improvised interventions by central banks and governments that reshaped global economic governance. The book follows the crisis through its subsequent phases: the European sovereign debt emergencies, the battles over austerity, and the political aftershocks that produced Brexit and Trump. Tooze is attentive to the connections between economic policy and democratic legitimacy, showing how technocratic crisis management created the political backlash now destabilizing Western democracies. For readers seeking to understand how the 2008 crisis continues to shape our present, this book provides essential historical perspective.