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What a thriller, can barely imagine how it must've felt living through this decade. Found myself pausing the book and looking up GDP numbers of countries like Greece and Italy, in the hope that it turned out okay, just to relieve some tension. I probably heavily underrated the importance of international money flows prior to this book. At least my impression after reading Crashed is that affordable access to loans from major international banks, which relies on favourable credit ratings, can make or break a country's economic growth and with that the power and approval of its government.

„Though we might wish otherwise, the world economy is not run by medium-sized “Mittelstand� entrepreneurs but by a few thousand massive corporations, with interlocking shareholdings controlled by a tiny group of asset managers.�

More than once I was surprised that Tooze focusses relatively little on concrete economic activity in his analysis. For example when looking into Greece, I don't remember him saying much about on-the-ground changes in what people work on. I figured that all increases in loans and imposed austerity needed to be somehow translated into more profitable economic activity. Otherwise the fundamental issues would stay unresolved, right?

General factors that contributed to the crises that I noted down while reading the book:

Incompetence of investment firms:
-- failure to realize strongly correlated risks in their assets
-- failure to realize that subprime mortgages were rated mostly by credit agencies who are more lenient
-- running highly leveraged risks

Incompetence of governments:
-- failure of acknowledging the interdependence of international banks
-- race to the bottom dynamics between US and Europe regarding loosing regulation for big investment banks, allowing highly speculative investment strategies
-- general lack of understanding of what is going on (e.g. quotes from Sarkozy and German finance minister Peer Steinbrück picture them very overconfident and significantly out of their depth)
-- politicians having to pander to the public (e.g. even though the initial economic stimulus in the US was very successful and should've been expanded, this wasn't done at least in part due to lack of public support)
-- Germany comes away really really badly in the book, mostly for it's constant pushing for austerity and unwillingness to expand its financial involvement in the EU... it's hard for me to evaluate this, but the basic story that economic crises do not demand austerity but the opposite, economic stimulus, seems very plausible to me. I wonder if the negative evaluation of Germany's role is consensus in the field of economics.

Incompetence of economists
-- prior 2008, discussing the possibility of a severe recession was apparently punished and sidetracked severely by the economic elites (e.g. Tooze tells a pretty unfavourable anecdote about Larry Summers)

Complexity of international finance , you really get the impression that this whole topic is just really complicated and deserves better political decision makers than what we're throwing at it right now

Corruption , e.g. Tooze often mentions key politicians being heavily involved with international banks, Citi Bank being heavily involved with the Democrats, as a relevant factor in decisions

I really liked the book, it's well written and I think I understand many topics better now. But as a complete stranger to the topic, I didn't understand many aspects, and Tooze doesn't explain some technical terms, so for people like me I probably would recommend either reading it slowly and looking up unknown terms or ideas, and maybe reading a few introductory articles to international finance beforehand.