Shutdown
How Covid Shook the World's Economy
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £11.99
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
FINALIST FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING 2022
THE TIMES BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2021
'A complex story, which Tooze tells with clarity and verve... The world is unlikely to be treated to a better account of the economics of the pandemic' The Times
From the author of Crashed comes a gripping short history of how Covid-19 ravaged the global economy, and where it leaves us now
When the news first began to trickle out of China about a new virus in December 2019, risk-averse financial markets were alert to its potential for disruption. Yet they could never have predicted the total economic collapse that would follow in COVID-19's wake, as stock markets fell faster and harder than at any time since 1929, currencies across the world plunged, investors panicked, and even gold was sold.
In a matter of weeks, the world's economy was brought to an abrupt halt by governments trying to contain a spiralling public health catastrophe. Flights were grounded; supply chains broken; industries from tourism to oil to hospitality collapsed overnight, leaving hundreds of millions of people unemployed. Central banks responded with unprecedented interventions, just to keep their economies on life-support. For the first time since the second world war, the entire global economic system contracted.
This book tells the story of that shutdown. We do not yet know how this story ends, or what new world we will find on the other side. In this fast-paced, compelling and at times shocking analysis, Adam Tooze surveys the wreckage, and looks at where we might be headed next.
'A seriously impressive book, both endlessly quotable and rigorously analytical' Oliver Bullough, The Guardian
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The real shocker of the Covid-19 virus is not its death toll—there have been deadlier pandemics—it's "the scale of the response," writes historian Tooze (Crashed) in this sweeping survey. In what he calls "a comprehensive crisis of the neoliberal era," nearly 95% of the world's economies suffered a reduction in GDP, he writes, and the World Bank estimates that the long-term wage loss will be $10 trillion. Month by month, Tooze covers the progression of the pandemic, tracing government action in Wuhan in January and Italy's response in March as that country went into lockdown, charting the pandemic's impact on stock markets and on mental health, the divisions in America as the presidential election loomed, the debt faced by the hardest-hit countries, and the race to create a vaccine. A comprehensive history of an unprecedented year, Tooze's account describes how the pandemic played out politically across the globe, the interplay between climate change and the pandemic, and the myriad effects of the world economy nearly shutting down in a brief period that, as Tooze puts it, made "History with a capital ‘H.'" Readers will find this deeply informed parsing of the pandemic to be illuminating and thought-provoking.
