ADAM TOOZE

‘We are living through the first economic crisis of the Anthropocene’ At the spring meeting of the IMF this April, Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva referred to our current situation as a “crisis like no other”. In this new piece for The Guardian I attempt to situate that claim in relation to the political economy of the anthropocene.  “The great acceleration that defined the Anthropocene may have begun in 1945, but in 2020 we are facing the first crisis in which the blowback destabilises our entire economy. It is a reminder of how encompassing and immediate that

The scale, pace and extent of central bank action in response to the  COVID-19 crisis has been spectacular. It dwarfs that which followed the financial crisis of 2008.   In this piece in the Guardian, I sketched a first analysis of action on the part of the Fed, the ECB and the Bank of England. My aim was simply to establish a chronology of the action. This is no more than the beginning of a comprehensive investigation. That would involve a deeper analysis of the actual dynamics of crisis in the financial markets, which will