Adam Tooze > Quotes

“As billionaire investor Warren Buffett famously put it: “Actually, there’s been class warfare going on for the last 20 years, and my class has won.”
― Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

“life expectancy among working-class white Americans had been decreasing since the early 2000s. In modern history the only obvious parallel was with Russia in the desperate aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. One journalistic essay and academic research paper after another confirmed the disaster, until the narrative was capped in 2015 by Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s famous account of “deaths of despair.”
― Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

“Ill-timed German aggression had tipped Wilson onto their side. But if the Russian revolution had started a few months earlier, if Germany had postponed its decision to resume unrestricted U-boat warfare until the spring, or if Wilson had been able to stay out of the war until May, what might have been the result? Could the war have continued? Might democracy in Russia have been saved? As the departing German ambassador to Washington Count Bernstorff noted in agonized retrospect: If Germany over the winter of 1916–17 had ‘accepted Wilson’s mediation, the whole of American influence in Russia would have been exercised in favour of peace, and not, as events ultimately proved, against’ Germany. ‘Out of Wilson’s and Kerensky’s Peace programme’, Germany could surely have rescued a peace”
― Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

“The Third Reich made it its mission to use the authority of the state to coordinate efforts within industry to devise standardized and simplified versions of key consumer commodities. These would then be produced at the lowest possible price, enabling the German population to achieve an immediate breakthrough to a higher standard of living. The epithet which was generally attached to these products was Volk: the Volksempfaenger (radio), Volkswohnung (apartments), Volkswagen, Volkskuehlschrank (refrigerator), Volkstraktor (tractor).34 This list contains only those products that enjoyed the official backing of one or more agencies in the Third Reich. Private producers, however, had long appreciated that the term ‘Volk’ had good marketing potential, and they, too, joined the bandwagon. Amongst the various products they touted were Volks-gramophone (people’s gramophone), Volksmotorraeder (people’s motorbikes) and Volksnaehmaschinen (people’s sewing machines). In fact, by 1933 the use of the term ‘Volk’ had become so inflationary that the newly established German advertising council was forced to ban the unlicensed use of the term.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“Economics was the pre-eminent medium of American power, military force was a by-product.”
― Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

“This scenario of capitalism in its final stage consuming itself in an orgy of imperialist destruction is one of the hallmarks of Lenin’s political thinking.”
― Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

“Back in 2007, former Fed chair Alan Greenspan had been asked by the Zürich daily Tages-Anzeiger which candidate he was supporting in the upcoming presidential election. His response was striking. How he voted did not matter, Greenspan declared, because “(we) are fortunate that, thanks to globalization, policy decisions in the US have been largely replaced by global market forces. National security aside, it hardly makes any difference who will be the next president. The world is governed by market forces.”
― Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

“But what Hitler and his government did promise was an end to parliamentary democracy and the destruction of the German left and for this most of German big business was willing to make a substantial down-payment. In light of what Hitler said on the evening of 20 February, the violence of the Machtergreifung should not have come as any surprise. Krupp and his colleagues were willing partners in the destruction of political pluralism in Germany. And the net effect, by the end of 1934, was precisely as intended: a comprehensive popular demobilization.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“if there was any power in the 1930s and 1940s that exemplified the Fascist slogan of the ‘triumph of will’ over material circumstances it was not Nazi Germany, or Fascist Italy, but Stalin’s Marxist dictatorship.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“The basic reason for Germany’s lack of competitiveness, however, was not political in this crude sense. The basic problem was the uncompetitive exchange rate of the Reichsmark. As we have seen, this fundamental misalignment had first emerged in the autumn of 1931 after the devaluation of sterling. The second shock had come in April 1933 with the devaluation of the dollar. By 1933 only 20 per cent of world trade was still conducted between countries with currencies fixed in terms of gold. Germany’s failure to follow this trend meant that the prices of its exports, translated at the official exchange rate of the Reichsmark, were grossly uncompetitive. This was not a matter of particular industries or sectors. It was not a matter of high wages, or excessive taxes and social levies. At prevailing exchange rates, the entire system of prices and wages in Germany was out of line with that prevailing in most of the rest of the world economy.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“To purchase a Volkswagen, customers were required to make a weekly deposit of at least 5 Reichsmarks into a DAF account on which they received no interest. Once the account balance had reached 750 Reichsmarks, the customer was entitled to delivery of a VW. The DAF meanwhile achieved an interest saving of 130 Reichsmarks per car. In addition, purchasers of the VW were required to take out a two-year insurance contract priced at 200 Reichsmarks. The VW savings contract was non-transferable, except in case of death, and withdrawal from the contract normally meant the forfeit of the entire sum deposited. Remarkably, 270,000 people signed up to these contracts by the end of 1939 and by the end of the war the number of VW-savers had risen to 340,000. In total, the DAF netted 275 million Reichsmarks in deposits. But not a single Volkswagen was ever delivered to a civilian customer in the Third Reich. After 1939, the entire output was reserved for official uses of various kinds. Most of Porsche’s half-finished factory was turned over to military production. The 275 million Reichsmarks deposited by the VW savers were lost in the post-war inflation. After a long legal battle, VW’s first customers received partial compensation only in the 1960s.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“The aggression of Hitler’s regime can thus be rationalized as an intelligible response to the tensions stirred up by the uneven development of global capitalism, tensions that are of course still with us today. But at the same time an understanding of the economic fundamentals also serves to sharpen our appreciation of the profound irrationality of Hitler’s project.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“The reason why Hitler gambled everything on a massive attack in 1940 was not because he was worried about making excessive demands on the German population, but simply because he thought that this was the only way that Germany could win the war.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“The chronic shortage of oil, the debility of the European coal mines and the fragility of the food chain, made it seem unlikely that Germany would in fact be able to ‘consolidate’ its conquests of 1940 without falling into excessive dependence on the Soviet Union.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“In the fateful last week in September, with Europe poised on the brink of war, a snatch squad apparently stood ready in Berlin to storm the Reich Chancellery and to arrest Hitler and the Nazi leadership.110”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“Drafting conscript workers was one thing. But unless they were adequately fed they were useless. There was no industry in the 1940s in which the correlation between labour productivity and calorific input was more direct than in mining.91 But after 1939 the food supply in Western Europe was no less constrained than the supply of coal.92 As was true of Germany, the high-intensity dairy farms of France, the Netherlands and Denmark were dependent on imported animal feed. Grain imports in the late 1930s had run at the rate of more than 7 million tons per annum mostly from Argentina and Canada. These sources of supply were closed off by the British blockade. In addition Western Europe had imported more than 700,000 tons of oil seed.93 Of course, France was a major producer of grain in its own right. But French grain yields depended, as they did in Germany, on large quantities of nitrogen-based fertilizer, which could be supplied only at the expense of the production of explosives. And like German agriculture, the farms of Western Europe depended on huge herds of draught animals and on the daily labour of millions of farm workers. The removal of horses, manpower, fertilizer and animal feed that followed the outbreak of war set off a disastrous chain reaction in the delicate ecology of European peasant farming. By the summer of 1940, Germany was facing a Europe-wide agricultural crisis.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“Political choice, ideology and agency are everywhere across this narrative with highly consequential results, not merely as disturbing factors but as vital reactions to the huge volatility and contingency generated by the malfunctioning of the giant “systems” and “machines” and apparatuses of financial engineering.”
― Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

“Of the growth in total national output in Germany between 1935 and 1938 almost half (47 per cent) was accounted for directly by the increase in the Reich’s military spending.15 If we add investment, of which a very large part was dictated either by the priorities of autarchy or rearmament, the share rises to two-thirds (67 per cent).”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“the strongest arguments for rushing to conquer the Soviet Union in 1941 were precisely the growing shortage of grain and the need to knock Britain out of the war before it could pose a serious air threat. The significance of the Blitzkrieg strategy adopted in 1940–41 was not that it allowed the overall level of mobilization to be kept to a minimum, but that it allowed the German war effort to be split into two parts. The factories producing for the army directed their efforts towards providing the equipment for a swift, motorized Blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the rest of the German military-industrial complex began to gird itself for the aerial confrontation with Britain and America.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“Despite the successful suppression campaign in February, the coronavirus crisis of 2020 could easily have been a major liability for Xi's regime. Instead, it became an occasion for what has been aptly termed "disaster nationalism," an opportunity to demonstrate collective resilience under the leadership of the party.”
― Adam Tooze, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy

“But however determined this programme of domestic consolidation, following the Reichstag election results of May 1924, not even the votes of the SPD were sufficient to carry the constitutional amendments necessary to ratify the Dawes Plan, which included an international mortgage on the Reichsbahn. Over a quarter of the German electorate had voted for the far right - 19 per cent for the DNVP, almost 7 per cent for Hitler's NSDAP. Almost 13 per cent had opted for the Communists. The two-thirds majority would have to include at least some deputies from the DNVP, intransigent foes of the Versailles Treaty and the progenitors of the 'stab in the back' legend. So concerned were the foreign powers that the American ambassador Alanson Houghton intervened directly in German party politics, summoning leading figures in the DNVP to explain bluntly that if they rejected the Dawes Plan, it would be one hundred years before America ever assisted Germany again. Under huge pressure from their business backers, on 29 August 1924 enough DNVP members defected to the government side to ratify the plan. In exchange, the Reich government offered a sop to the nationalist community by formally renouncing its acceptance of the war-guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty.

Nevertheless, on 10 October 1924 Jack Morgan bit his tongue and signed the loan agreement that committed his bank along with major financial interests in London, Paris and even Brussels to the 800-million Goldmarks loan. The loan was to apply the salve of business common sense to the wounds left by the war. And it was certainly an attractive proposition. The issuers of the Dawes Loan paid only 87 cents on the dollar for their bonds. They were to be redeemed with a 5 per cent premium. For the 800 million Reichsmarks it received, Germany would service bonds with a face value of 1.027 billion.

But if Morgan's were bewildered by the role they had been forced to play, this speaks to the eerie quality of the reconfiguration of international politics in 1924. The Labour government that hosted the final negotiations in London was the first socialist government elected to preside over the most important capitalist centre of the old world, supposedly committed by its party manifesto of 1919 to a radical platform of nationalization and social transformation. And yet in the name of 'peace' and 'prosperity' it was working hand in glove with an avowedly conservative adminstration in Washington and the Bank of England to satisfy the demands of American investors, in the process imposing a damaging financial settlement on a radical reforming government in France, to the benefit of a German Republic, which was at the time ruled by a coalition dominated by the once notorious annexationist, but now reformed Gustav Stresemann.

'Depoliticization' is a euphemistic way of describing this tableau of mutual evisceration. Certainly, it had been no plan of Wilson's New Freedom to raise Morgan's to such heights. In fact, even Morgan's did not want to own the terms of the Dawes Settlement. Whereas Wilson had invoked public opinion as the final authority, this was now represented by the 'investing' public, for whom the bankers, as financial advisors, were merely the spokesmen. But if a collective humbling of the European political class had been what lay behind Wilson's call for a 'peace without victory' eight years earlier, one can't help thinking that the Dawes Plan and the London Conference of 1924 must have had him chuckling in his freshly dug grave. It was a peace. There were certainly no European victors.”
― Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

“It was only in 1893 that Britain had seen fit to upgrade its legation in the American capital to the status of a full embassy. Now, less than a generation later, European history seemed to hang on the posture that Washington would adopt towards the war.”
― Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

“It may seem anachronistic to refer to these production figures in a discussion of the summer of 1940, but this is precisely the point. Though the mobilization of the American economy after Pearl Harbor is the stuff of legend, it did not start in December 1941. The foundation of the Allies’ overwhelming aerial superiority was laid as early as the summer of 1940, in direct response to Germany’s victory over France. Whether the bombers would be flown by British or American pilots remained to be decided, as did the embarrassing question of finance, but the bombers were coming in any event.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“Many retrospective accounts of collective solidarity of World War II are egregiously sugarcoated.”
― Adam Tooze, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy

“Such comparisons with the mid-century heyday of Keynesianism no doubt help to capture the drama of the moment. They express the wish of many, on the left as well as the right, to return to that moment when the national economy was first constituted as an integrated and governable entity. As the interconnected implosion of demand and supply demonstrated, macroeconomic connections are very real. But as a frame for reading the crisis response in 2020, this retrofitting risks anachronism. The fiscal-monetary synthesis of 2020 was a synthesis for the twenty-first century.5 While it overturned the nostrums of neoliberalism, notably with regard to the scale of government interventions, it was framed by neoliberalism’s legacies, in the form of hyperglobalization, fragile and attenuated welfare states, profound social and economic inequality, and the overweening size and influence of private finance.”
― Adam Tooze, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy

“If there was to be a sudden wave of withdrawals, the small size of emerging financial markets would amplify the stampede effect.10”
― Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

“The basic and possibly most radical contention of this book is that these interrelated shifts in our historical perception require a reframing of the history of the Third Reich, a reframing which has the disturbing effect both of rendering the history of Nazism more intelligible, indeed eerily contemporary, and at the same time bringing into even sharper relief its fundamental ideological irrationality.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“In retrospect, it suited neither the Allies nor the Germans to expose the amazingly haphazard course through which the Wehrmacht had arrived at its most brilliant military success. The myth of the Blitzkrieg suited the British and French because it provided an explanation other than military incompetence for their pitiful defeat. But whereas it suited the Allies to stress the alleged superiority of German equipment, Germany’s own propaganda viewed the Blitzkrieg in less materialistic terms. Technological determinism, after all, would have been fundamentally at odds with the voluntarist and anti-materialist axioms of Nazi ideology.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“In both respects”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

“It was also the Luftwaffe that would be the first to face the terrifying industrial might of the United States.”
― Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy