In late January 2025, ten days after Donald Trump began his second term as US president, an economic conference in Brussels brought together former Biden administration officials to discuss the global economy. The Democratic exiles touted their late-term achievements and quoted poetry, but it was historian Adam Tooze who struck a discordant note, arguing that the Biden team had 'failed in its absolutely central mission, which was to prevent a second Trump administration'.
Tooze, a British-born economic historian based at Columbia University in New York, has become a leading public intellectual since the publication of his 2018 book 'Crashed', a contemporary history of the 2008 financial crisis. He is now widely recognised as an expert on global finance, the green-energy transition, and the political economy of Europe, the US and China.
In addition to his academic work, Tooze writes regular columns for the Financial Times and the London Review of Books, hosts podcasts in English and German, and publishes a daily Substack newsletter called Chartbook, which has over 160,000 subscribers, including Nobel laureate Paul Krugman and former US treasury secretary Larry Summers. A Chinese-language version of Chartbook received 30 million impressions last year.
Tooze is known for his synthesising approach, engaging with activists, senators, development economists, financial executives, and Chinese Communist party officials alike. On the Brussels panel, he argued that the Biden administration's policies had hastened the dismantling of the liberal world order, rather than preventing it, by aiming to contain China 'by any means necessary'.
