Hello my name is David Ronserman and this is Talking Politics. Today we're talking to the

historian Adam Tuz about his epic new history of the world since 2008, since the financial

crisis. It's called crashed. This is a big conversation about some of the biggest ideas

of all.

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Helen Thompson and I went to talk to Adam Tuz a few days ago. We recorded this conversation in

London. The occasional siren you can hear in the background is the mean streets of Old Street,

not Cambridge. It's a slightly longer conversation than usual because we had an awful lot to talk

about. As you'll hear, this is about some of the things we have been thinking about and talking

about on this podcast for the last two years, particularly how politics and economics only make sense

together. The book starts with, to me, a kind of revelatory section about the wrong crisis,

how people were thinking about the world pre-2008 and so you tell me if I've understood it wrong,

but what I took from it was that the fear was of those kinds of economic relationships where

there was a lot of political discretion. So the relationship between American China,

relationships around the exchange rate, around commerce, around trade and what economists do is they

see the possibility of politicians taking decisions and it scares them. But actually,

we knew in a way how to deal with those things because there was political discretion and where

the real risk was, in those areas of the economy that the economists thought they had protected

...