We live in a world where dramatic shifts in the domestic and global economy command the headlines, from rollbacks in U.S. banking regulations to tariffs that may ignite international trade wars. But current events have deep roots, and, as Adam Tooze demonstrates, the key to navigating today's roiling policies lies in the events that started it all—the 2008 economic crisis and its aftermath. Crashed offers an eye-opening and necessary reinterpretation of the personalities, decisions, and policies that dominated economic, political, and international events of the last tumultuous decade. Despite initial attempts to downplay the crisis as a local incident, what happened on Wall Street beginning in 2008 was, in fact, a dramatic caesura of global significance. In the United States and Europe, it caused a fundamental reconsideration of capitalist democracy. It destabilized Ukraine, forced the question of Brexit, and set the stage for the rise of Trump. It was the greatest crisis to have struck Western societies since the end of the Cold War, but was it inevitable? And is it over? Crashed reconstructs the story through a wealth of original themes: the haphazard nature of economic development and the erratic path of debt around the world; the unseen way individual countries and regions are linked together in deeply unequal relationships through financial interdependence, investment, politics, and force; the ways the financial crisis interacted with the spectacular rise of social media, the crisis of middle-class America, the rise of China, and global struggles over fossil fuels. Finally, Tooze asks, given this history, what now are the prospects for a liberal, stable, and coherent world order? With a historian's eye for detail, connection, and consequence, he brings the story right up to today's negotiations, actions, and threats—a much-needed perspective on a global catastrophe and its long-term consequences.