Crashed: how a decade of financial crises changed the world

In September 2008 the Great Financial Crisis, triggered by the collapse of Lehman brothers, shook the world. A decade later its spectre still haunts us. As the appalling scope and scale of the crash was revealed, the financial institutions that had symbolised the West's triumph since the end of the Cold War, seemed - through greed, malice and incompetence - to be about to bring the entire system to its knees. In this talk Adam Tooze will talk about his new book, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World.

Crashed is an analysis of what happened and how we were rescued from something even worse - but at a price which continues to undermine democracy across Europe and the United States. Gnawing away at our institutions are the many billions of dollars which were conjured up to prevent complete collapse. Over and over again, the end of the crisis has been announced, but it continues to hound us - whether in Greece or Ukraine, whether through Brexit or Trump. 

Adam Tooze @adam_tooze is the author of The Deluge and The Wages of Destruction.The Wages of Destruction won the Wolfson Prize for History and the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Prize. He has taught at Cambridge and Yale and is now Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University. He is an alumnus of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Tim Frost is a Chair of credit asset manager Cairn Capital and a Trustee of Step Change the debt charity. He served in the British Army in Germany and the Falkland Islands and ran a hostel for homeless people before spending 15 years at JP Morgan, where he helped to establish the credit derivatives business. Tim is an Emeritus Governor and alumnus of the London School of Economics and Political Science, and was appointed a Director of the Bank of England in 2012.

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSETooze