In late January 2025, 10 days after Donald Trump was sworn in for a second term as US president, an economic conference in Brussels brought together former Biden administration officials to discuss the global economy. While the Democratic exiles touted their late-term achievements and quoted poetry, historian Adam Tooze injected a discordant note, stating flatly that the Biden team had 'failed in its absolutely central mission, which was to prevent a second Trump administration'.
Tooze, born in London and raised in West Germany, now teaches at Columbia University in New York. For years a successful but largely unknown economic historian of Europe, he rose to prominence with his 2018 book 'Crashed', a contemporary history of the 2008 financial crisis. Since then, he has become, in the words of his FT editor Jonathan Derbyshire, 'a sort of platonic ideal of the universal intellectual'.
Tooze is now widely acknowledged as an expert on global finance infrastructure and the economics of the green-energy transition. He 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 total impressions last year.
Despite his influence, Tooze is not generally regarded as an eager controversialist. He prizes connection and synthesis, and is equally at home talking to activists in South Africa, senators in Washington, or Chinese Communist party officials in Beijing. At the Brussels conference, he argued that the dismantling of the liberal world order had been hastened, not hindered, by the Biden veterans on stage, as he saw Biden no less than Trump aiming to ensure US dominance over China by any means necessary.
