US Hegemony, the Dollar System & Global Imbalances
12 tier-5 · 6 tier-4
This is the spine of Tooze's macro-historical project: the dollar as a managed political instrument rather than a natural fact. The 'Hegemony Notes' trace US dominance to WWI Liberty Loans (301), the interwar 'hegemonic malfunction' of 1919-23 (304), the 1920s denaturing of the gold standard (310), and the bondholders' deflation interest (311). The present-day pieces dissect the dollar system's machinery - eurodollars and stablecoins (348), market-based finance and the Treasury core (401), discretionary swap-lines-turned-slush-lines (443) - and recast America as a capital-importing net borrower utterly unlike the capital-exporting Edwardian British hegemon (443). The global-imbalances strand (397, 442, 433) argues the net US-deficit/China-surplus optic misreads where the world economy's real weight sits. The cluster is the durable analytical reference for how monetary power actually works.
TIER 5
Jul 24, 2024
Drawing on his book Deluge, Tooze traces the origins of modern American hegemony to WWI, when European military stalemate turned US finance, manufacturing and raw materials into the decisive factor, JP Morgan reversed the flow of global credit, and government-to-government Liberty Loans plus excess-profits taxation lifted federal spending from 2% to nearly 25% of GDP. The piece's lasting value is its framework: hegemony as an improvised, fragile, contested order whose first iteration collapsed in 1917-23 over debts, reparations and the 1920-21 deflationary shock. A landmark historical essay that reframes the present-day hegemony debate.
WWI financeUS hegemonyLiberty Loanseconomic historyglobal imbalances
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Aug 4, 2024
The fourth entry in Tooze's hegemony-notes series argues that post-WWI America (1919-1923) is the textbook case of 'hegemonic malfunction': having become the world's de facto creditor and pivot, the US simultaneously rejected the League, slammed shut immigration, reverted to protectionism, and delivered a savage fiscal-monetary deflationary shock (the underrated 1920-21 depression), breaking labor and seeding the KKK upsurge. Centering inter-Allied war debt as a novel, irreducibly political hegemonic problem, he shows how Congress's tax-payer-first hard line foreclosed European stabilization. An original, deeply sourced historical framework with durable reference value.
hegemonyeconomic-historywar-debt1920-depressioninterwar
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Aug 18, 2024
A major Hegemony-Notes essay arguing that 20th-century US hegemony was a radically new problem born after WWI, framed for the first time in the newly unified language of monetary macroeconomics (quantity theory, purchasing-power parity) as the gold standard was 'denatured' into an avowedly political, managed system. Tooze shows the 1920-21 US deflation transmitted globally, breaking the postwar strike wave (Maier's 'global thermidor'), and that Keynes recognized the dollar as the inevitable single center yet judged surrendering monetary sovereignty to the Fed too dangerous. An original, reference-grade reframing of the intellectual origins of dollar dominance.
dollar dominancemonetary macroeconomics1920shegemonyKeynes
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Aug 23, 2024
A landmark entry in Tooze's 'Hegemony Notes' arguing that interwar and 1980s deflationary policy was no policy failure but the prevailing of bondholder class interests, since deflation restores the real value of fixed-interest debt (Kalecki on capital-labour, plus the bondholder logic on financial markets). Using long-run return data he shows bondholders earned outsized real gains (14.6% pa) through the worst of 1926-33, and that US and UK authorities deliberately deflated to restore war-bond values, setting the deflationary terms of dollar dominance. Original framework with lasting reference value for the political economy of monetary policy.
monetary historydeflationbondholdershegemonyKalecki
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Sep 18, 2024
Tooze dismantles Brian Deese's call for a 'Clean Energy Marshall Plan,' arguing it misreads both Marshall Plan history (which solved a dollar shortage, not export promotion) and present reality (the US lags China badly in actual green tech, while Deese's favored 'clean' technologies—hydrogen, carbon capture, nuclear—are fossil-industry favorites). He reframes such proposals, alongside sovereign-wealth-fund talk, as bids by 'economic statecrafters' for autonomy within a deadlocked US political system rather than coherent global strategy. A landmark essay tying economic history to a critique of threadbare American hegemony in a multipolar world.
Marshall PlanUS hegemonyclean energy transitionChina competitiondollar system
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Jan 25, 2025
A landmark Chartbook essay using the Menand/Younger Odd Lots history of the eurodollar to build an original framework for thinking about stablecoins as the would-be successor to offshore dollars. Tooze explains how the eurodollar system was bootstrapped, made "dollar-like" via Fed swap lines, and grew "too big to fail" (citing his own Crashed on 2008), then argues stablecoins replicate the same onshore/offshore parity problem with far flimsier backstops, and that crypto's advocates must reckon with the eurodollar's political economy rather than depoliticized tech analogies. High reference value on global money, dollar hegemony, and crypto.
eurodollarsstablecoins / cryptodollar hegemonyglobal money / shadow bankingFed swap lines
TIER 4
Feb 28, 2025
A research-heavy issue: a Du-Huber NBER paper documents how foreign USD securities holdings grew six-fold over two decades with hedging demand reaching $2tn, and a Barwick-Kalouptsidi study finds China's ~$90bn shipbuilding subsidies (mostly entry subsidies via free land) generated negative ~80% economic returns by inducing low-productivity entry and worsening overcapacity. A long Nickson excerpt details the Stroessner dictatorship's legacy and how the lopsided Itaipu Dam treaty cost Paraguay $77bn in lost revenue to Brazil. Strong reference value on industrial policy and dollar dominance.
dollar holdings / hedgingChina shipbuilding subsidiesindustrial policyParaguay / Itaipuhydro power
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Jul 8, 2025
A Top Links roundup with strong financial-history content: it frames stablecoins as fintech-wrapped money-market funds and, most substantively, documents the retreat of China Investment Corp from US markets, the $1.3tn sovereign fund that bailed out Morgan Stanley and Blackstone in 2007-08 now selling buyout stakes amid sanctions fears and NDRC capital controls. The pieces together sketch the unwinding of Chimerica-era financial integration.
stablecoins/MMFChina Investment Corpsovereign wealth fundsChimerica unwindhedge funds
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Jul 20, 2025
A major synthesis arguing the dollar's resilience rests not just on network 'flow' effects and military-backed safe-asset status but on a $24.6tn negative net international investment position that traps creditors into propping up dollar strength. Drawing on Atkeson et al and Milesi-Ferretti, Tooze shows the post-2010 surge in US liabilities reflects outsized equity returns from America's lopsided, monopoly-profit-driven political economy, and that the 'new creditors' are mostly advanced economies in America's hegemonic bloc, recasting the 'dollar trap' as 'empire by invitation.'
dollar systemnet investment positionexorbitant privilegeAmerican exceptionalismglobal imbalances
TIER 4
Jul 30, 2025
A substantive numbered essay (World Economy Now #3) distilling the BIS Annual Report's account of how global finance has reorganized since 2008: a shift from bank lending to sovereign bonds, from banks to non-bank financial institutions (NBFIs), and from EM official to Advanced-Economy private creditors holding US Treasuries. Tooze explains why the new systemic risk is a liquidity-stress/repo-fire-sale dynamic in the Treasury and JGB markets (echoing March 2020), making the dollar system more exposed to foreign shocks just as Trump-Fed relations sour — a valuable explainer with reference value.
dollar systemmarket-based financeTreasuriesBISfinancial stability
TIER 5
Nov 12, 2025
A landmark conceptual essay (a cleaned-up Berlin keynote) arguing we should stop thinking in terms of fixed economic 'order' (the Bretton Woods fairy tale, which Tooze deconstructs psychologically, historically, and via a Nietzschean account of resentful subordinates who game the rules) and instead think in terms of continuous 'ordering' — deals, conjunctures, world-making. It reframes China not as a builder of an American-style order but as the leading practitioner of world ordering driven by 'large nations' development on a global scale.' High lasting reference value as the original framework underpinning Tooze's China/BRI writing.
world orderBretton WoodsChinainternational political economyhegemony
TIER 4
Dec 23, 2025
Numbered essay using Berlin's localization campaigns (McDonald's 'Made in Germany', Coca-Cola made by 'Heike', the Nazi-era origin of Fanta) to theorize American soft power as a malleable, non-linear network woven from geopolitics, capital, technology, and consumer desire rather than state agency. Argues 2025 marks a one-sided 'disturbance in the Force': Europeans feel the rupture viscerally while Americans no longer feel organically linked to Europe. A characteristic Tooze cultural-economy framework piece.
soft powerAmerican hegemonyconsumer capitalismCoca-Cola historyUS-Germany relations
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Jan 21, 2026
Tooze traces the intellectual through-line in Mark Carney's thinking from his 2019 Jackson Hole speech on the dollar-centric international monetary system to his 2026 Davos 'rupture, not a transition' address, arguing Carney long anticipated the end of US hegemony and prescribed a multipolar, 'variable geometry' order of middle-power coalitions ('value-based realism'). A reference-quality synthesis linking monetary-system reform to post-hegemonic grand strategy, heavily quoting both speeches.
Mark Carneymonetary systemUS hegemonymultipolaritymiddle powers
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Jan 31, 2026
Links roundup carrying two unusually substantive items: the US farm crisis (Mississippi rice futures down ~30%, farmers floating paying to destroy harvests as India floods world markets) and the Klein-Farrell "enshittification of American power" argument that US-provided platforms (dollar clearing, weapons systems) start awesome then degrade and trap dependent allies like Canada. Also Helen Thompson on 2005 as the geopolitical/energy watershed year. The enshittification framing is a genuinely useful analytic lens.
US farm crisisenshittificationAmerican hegemonyplatform powerenergy geopolitics
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Feb 15, 2026
Using 2026 ILO employment-linked-to-trade data, Tooze argues 81% of trade-related employment is in Eurasia (Asia-Pacific 60%, Europe/Central Asia 21%), so globalization should not be read through the US deficit / China surplus "global imbalances" lens. Focusing on net imbalances misses where the real center of gross trade flows lies; the punchline is that "globalization is over when Eurasia says it is, not when the US has a protectionist tantrum." A useful reframing of how to measure and locate the world economy's trade core.
globalizationEurasiatrade employmentglobal imbalancesILO data
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Apr 22, 2026
Tooze's anchor essay on the 2026 'global imbalances' debate argues that within the unchanging macroeconomic accounting framework, four radically novel forces are now mixed: Trump's trade-policy rampage, anomalous US fiscal incontinence at full employment, the AI boom reshaping world trade (TSMC/Samsung chip surpluses), and China's industrial-policy gear-shift constituting a genuine 'China shock 2.0' aimed mainly at Europe. Engaging Setser, Pettis, the CEPR Paris report, and IMF data, it provides a definitive synthesis of the present world-economy conjuncture with strong reference value.
global imbalancesChina shockUS fiscal policyAI boomworld economy
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Apr 24, 2026
Tooze dissects the proposed US-UAE 'swap line,' arguing it is not a Fed-style central-bank liquidity backstop but a politically motivated Treasury facility drawn from the Exchange Stabilization Fund, deployable by the Secretary without FOMC or Congressional accountability. He traces the ESF's history from 1934 through Mexico 1995, the Asian crisis, 2008, COVID, and the 2025 Argentina/Milei bailout to show how 'swap lines' morph into geopolitical 'slush lines.' An original, reference-grade analysis of the institutional machinery of discretionary US financial power.
swap linesExchange Stabilization FundUAEBessentdollar system
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Apr 26, 2026
Tooze dismantles the fashionable analogy between today's US-China tension and pre-1914 Britain-Germany, showing the capital flows are inverted: Edwardian Britain was a 'hard-working hegemon' exporting capital downhill to the developing periphery while running a self-renewing wealth endowment, whereas 21st-century America is a net borrower drawing capital uphill. Engages Pettis-Klein's neo-Hobsonian reading, Bank of England long-run data, and the Polanyian double movement to argue today's configuration is structurally far stranger. A landmark economic-history essay with deep reference value.
economic historyglobal imbalanceshegemonyBritish Empirecapital flows
Polycrisis, Method & Intellectual / Cultural History
11 tier-5 · 10 tier-4
This is where Tooze theorizes his own practice and reaches for history as method. The flagship essays defend 'polycrisis' as a deliberately weak concept registering genuine novelty (343), revisit it against MAGA as 'America's polycrisis in one country' (407), and lay out 'conjunctural analysis' via Stuart Hall, Massey and Peck (384), 'thinking in medias res' (341) and the lab-monkey price as a polycrisis exemplar (426). The 'against synecdoche' and 'uneven and combined development' pieces propose the sector as the unit of analysis (339, 340); the 'interregnum' critique resists transition-thinking (325); heterodoxy is embraced as program (448). The intellectual-history strand spans Wang Hui (441), Keynes (342), Kluge (438), Baudrillard on the Iran war (435) and the AJR Nobel (328), and the deep-history essays - the Holocaust against Reichsbahn freight data (387), Speer as 'American Psycho' (364), Koselleck on the endings of war (382), Grossman (reissue), Malaparte (344) and an 'American Victory Day' (379) - supply the humanist counterweight to the data-driven Chartbook. The cluster is the explicit statement of Tooze's worldview and the moral depth behind it.
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Oct 9, 2024
In Hegemony note 8, Tooze pushes back on 'interregnum'/transition thinking (the Gramsci 'old is dying, new cannot be born' trope), arguing the present is not a birth obstructed but a built, ramshackle assemblage with no guaranteed resolution. He uses his own FT column on the incoherence between macroeconomics and industrial policy (an 'anti-paradigm') as a case study, including being 'interregnum-ed' by an editor's headline. A thoughtful methodological reflection on economic narrative and ideology.
interregnumGramsciindustrial policymacroeconomicspolycrisis
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Oct 19, 2024
Tooze reads the 2024 economics Nobel for Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson as the intellectual capstone of Bidenomics and its neoconservative turn, arguing AJR's institutions-and-rights framework underwrites the democracy-vs-autocracy framing and the bet that free societies out-innovate China. He traces their arc from the 2001 colonial-origins paper to increasingly wide-ranging and (he argues) sometimes hair-raising claims about Confucianism, creative destruction, and Taiwan as China's possible future, calling it an 'unreconstructed 21st-century Whiggery.' It matters as a sharp original synthesis tying a marquee economics prize to a specific great-power ideology.
AJR NobelBidenomicsinstitutions and growthChinaneoconservatism
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Dec 15, 2024
A reissued long-form essay (written 2021 after his father's death) on Vasily Grossman's two-volume Stalingrad epic, reading the novels as a meditation on time, history, and totalitarianism at a moment of extreme crisis. Tooze develops original arguments about how Soviet 'unfreedom' was historically generative rather than merely repressive, and how freedom and death intertwine across the front, the gulag, and the gas chamber. A landmark piece of literary-historical reflection with lasting reference value.
GrossmanStalingradWWIItotalitarianismliterature
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Dec 18, 2024
The conceptual setup (re-edited from 2017) to Chartbook 340, asking what exactly is 'uneven' and 'combined' in global capitalism by juxtaposing the state-anchored global dollar system with the hourglass-shaped global cocoa-chocolate chain. Tooze proposes the 'sector' as a unit between commodity-chain specificity and reified national-economy or 'capitalism' generality, drawing on Tim Mitchell and the pluralist Latour. A foundational methodological piece for his sectoral approach to political economy.
political economy methoduneven & combined developmentdollar system vs cocoasectors / commodity chainsLatour / Mitchell
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Dec 19, 2024
An original conceptual essay (re-edited from Tooze's 2017 blog) proposing a roughly ten-part taxonomy of distinct sectoral 'complexes' of capitalist globalization—the dollar system, agro-industrial, footloose manufacturing, extractive/oil, biopolitical, real estate, military-industrial, logistics, ICT, and entertainment—each with its own techno-political logic. The 'against synecdoche' thesis is a critique of reducing capitalism to one master metaphor (Fordism, financialization). A useful analytic framework for thinking about uneven and combined development.
capitalism / globalizationsectoral taxonomyuneven & combined developmentpolitical economy methodagainst synecdoche
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Dec 22, 2024
A substantive guest essay by political theorist Stefan Eich rereading Keynes's 'in the long run we are all dead' not as indifference to the future but as a Burke-inflected critique of neoclassical equilibrium and austerity, which sacrifice the present for an empty, naturalized 'long run.' Eich reconstructs Keynes's politics of time—uncertainty, performativity of expectations, and open experimentation—with direct bearing on climate-era debates. A serious intellectual-history piece with reference value.
Keynespolitics of time / temporalityintellectual historyuncertainty & expectationsclimate Keynesianism
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Dec 24, 2024
A far-reaching interview in which Tooze lays out his intellectual method most fully since Perry Anderson's review: the case for 'polycrisis' over Gramscian interregnum, a sharp critique of Mearsheimer's realism for not taking war seriously, his Latour/Beck-inflected approach to statistics and structure, his defense of thinking 'in medias res,' and his argument that climate change is the first domain where China (not the West) becomes the decisive historical agent. A landmark statement of Tooze's worldview with lasting reference value.
polycrisisintellectual methodMearsheimer / realismLatour / BeckChina & climate
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Jan 6, 2025
Tooze's flagship theoretical essay defending 'polycrisis' as a deliberately weak, underspecified concept that resists the false certainties of capitalocentric social theory and registers the radical novelty of the present (ecological breakdown as pacesetter, multipolar nuclear arms race, oligarchic hyper-agency). Drawing on Gibson-Graham's critique of overdetermination, Latour and Beck, he reframes 'a world at loose ends' as having novel scope not just for agency but for catastrophe. A landmark statement of his intellectual project with lasting reference value.
polycrisiscritical theorycapitaloceneclimate crisisGibson-Graham
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Jan 12, 2025
A deep literary-historical essay reading Malaparte's three WWII books (The Volga Rises, Kaputt, The Skin) as a triptych, arguing his core idea is the Eastern Front as a civil war between rival machine civilizations—German National Socialism and Soviet communism—each producing soldier-technicians forged by industrialization. Tooze recovers the neglected Volga Rises as the interpretive key and asks whether our own polycrisis needs a Malaparte. A rich, original cultural-history piece, less core-economic but high in lasting reference value.
MalaparteWWIIEastern Frontmachine civilizationliterary history
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Mar 21, 2025
A reprised long essay reviewing Martin Kitchen's biography of Albert Speer, dismantling the postwar 'good Nazi' myth and recasting Speer as an empty, product-obsessed narcissist — 'American Psycho' rather than Musil's 'man without qualities' — whose 'armaments miracle' rested on slave labor and propaganda. Tooze draws the contemporary resonance: the cult of technocratic 'performance' (Leistung) as an end in itself, and the danger of the persuasive 'thought leader' who rationalizes complicity in larger forces.
Albert SpeerNazi war economytechnocracyhistoriographybanality of evil
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May 3, 2025
Expanding on his FT op-ed, Tooze examines the politics of commemorating WWII's 80th anniversary alongside the Trump administration: Trump's historical revisionism, his fondness for parades, his unilateral declaration of May 8th as 'Victory Day,' and the purge of the Holocaust Memorial Council. He marshals casualty data showing the US ranked only 18th in WWII deaths to puncture the bombast and argue commemoration is an exercise of selectivity and power. A sharp memory-politics essay.
WWII commemorationmemory politicsTrumpHolocausthistorical revisionism
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May 8, 2025
For the 80th anniversary of VE Day, Tooze presents his own English translation (juxtaposed with the German) of historian Reinhart Koselleck's 1995 memoir 'Glowing lava hardened into memory,' prefaced by a biographical sketch of Koselleck's path from Wehrmacht artilleryman to Soviet POW at Auschwitz and theorist of historical time. The piece dramatizes Koselleck's central claim that there are many, non-interchangeable endings to the war and that primary experiential knowledge cannot be outdone by later 'knowing better.' A rare original-translation and intellectual-history landmark.
KoselleckWWII memoryintellectual historytranslationhistorical time
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May 14, 2025
A methodological essay in which Tooze builds, via Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey and geographer Jamie Peck, an explicit account of 'conjunctural analysis' as his own working method: situated, theory-using-but-not-procrustean, anomaly-seeking ('crash-testing'), and grounded in uneven and combined development. He positions China's coal-driven rise as the defining conjuncture our concepts must now grapple with. A foundational statement of Tooze's intellectual approach with durable reference value.
conjunctural analysisStuart HallmethodologypolycrisisChina/capitalism
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May 23, 2025
Tooze attacks the cliche that equates the Holocaust with 'industrial modernity' by taking the analogies literally: Reichsbahn data show the death-camp transports consumed roughly a tenth of one percent of rail freight capacity, and the Auschwitz crematoria were underpowered municipal-grade ovens dwarfed by any blast furnace or the Manhattan Project. The argument reframes the Holocaust's significance as moral and political rather than technological-industrial, exemplifying his 'uneven and combined development' lens. A landmark essay with lasting reference value.
Holocaustindustrial modernityeconomic historyNazi Germanyhistoriography
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Sep 6, 2025
Tooze revisits 'polycrisis,' the term he popularized in 2022, and argues it now feels anachronistic: the present moment resists naturalized, anonymous 'crisis' framing (bond yields, fiscal balances) and instead demands attention to specific agents and networks like Trump and MAGA, which he glosses as 'America's polycrisis in one country.' He frames the financial commentariat's longing for a Treasury-market sell-off as a wish to restore the 'gravity' of impersonal social forces, and reads polycrisis as a Hegelian Aufhebung registering managerial ideology's self-conscious crisis. A landmark methodological reflection on how to theorize the conjuncture.
polycrisisneoliberalismconjunctural analysisTrump/MAGAcritical theory
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Jan 18, 2026
Using the 'hog cycle' in lab-monkey (non-human primate) prices—tracked by bank analysts as a proxy for biotech testing volume—Tooze turns a niche supply-chain curiosity into a model of the polycrisis: China's biotech boom drives RMB-denominated prices to record highs while RFK Jr.'s HHS moves to end animal research and monkey imports, intersecting COVID export bans, Cambodia smuggling, endangered-species rules, and US-China research competition. A landmark example of reading uneven-and-combined development through one obscure price.
lab monkeysChina biotechpolycrisisRFK Jr / HHSsupply chains
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Mar 1, 2026
A numbered Chartbook essay reading Baudrillard's Consumer Society (consumption of catastrophe as sign, the 'profound pleasure of not being there') against the US-Israeli attack on Iran and the earlier Venezuela action. Tooze asks whether Baudrillard's functionalist account of war-as-spectacle still holds in 2026, when the Iran action seems wholly divorced from American politics with no public preparation, suggesting we may be 'beyond Baudrillard.'
BaudrillardIran warmedia theoryconsumer societyTrump
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Mar 28, 2026
A long, deeply personal numbered Chartbook essay marking the death of Alexander Kluge, reconstructing his project as a "materialism with the feelings put back in" rooted in the Frankfurt School, the anti-realism of feeling, and a montage method opposed to 19th-century linear realism. Tooze situates Kluge's grand arc (the wrong exit from early modernity, the popular-war/industrialization/new-tenderness triad, homo compensator over homo sapiens) and ties it intriguingly to Keynesian agency. Substantive intellectual history, though outside Chartbook's economic core.
Alexander Klugecritical theoryFrankfurt Schoolintellectual historyobituary
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Apr 15, 2026
An original Tooze essay on the eerie mood at the IMF/World Bank spring meetings: amid two shooting wars and record policy uncertainty (the IMF's severe scenario projects oil +100%, European/Asian gas +200%), the DC conversation is defined by silences and euphemism. Tooze argues that framing the moment as mere 'uncertainty' and 'risk' denies the political origin of the shocks, treating US derangement as exogenous, and amounts to a cocktail of escapism and cognitive dissonance, capped by an operator's chilling 'we're burning the house down... new growth flourishes after a fire.'
IMF spring meetingspolycrisisIran war scenariospolicy uncertaintydepoliticization
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Apr 17, 2026
A substantial edited transcript of Tooze in dialogue with Tsinghua's Wang Hui (China's leading 'New Left' intellectual), introduced by Kaiser Kuo, on whether the present is a 'return of the nineteenth century' or a 'two-faced present' that recreates the old in genuinely new conditions. They range across Hobsbawm's 'short twentieth century', the Anthropocene, Carl Schmitt's friend/foe politics and 'neutralisation', Mao's 'people's war' and depoliticisation, and Lu Xun as theorist of failure who refused despair. A landmark cross-traditional conversation with lasting reference value on theorizing modernity outside the West.
intellectual historyWang HuiChina New LeftCarl Schmittmodernity/Anthropocene
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May 11, 2026
Taking Gita Gopinath's warning that fiscally constrained governments may resort to price controls, financial repression, nationalization, and central-bank coordination, Tooze inverts the framing: in an age of permanent polycrisis these "Four Horsemen of Heterodoxy" should be embraced and prepared for, not anathematized. He grounds the case in the post-2008 IMF/BIS turn (Borio, Gopinath's own integrated-policy framework) that already legitimized emerging-market heterodoxy beyond the Mundell-Fleming/Washington-consensus playbook. A reference-grade statement of his political-economy program.
financial repressionheterodox policypolycrisisfiscal-monetary coordinationWashington consensus
Trumpism, MAGA & the Remaking of US Politics
7 tier-5 · 20 tier-4
Across these pieces Tooze treats Trump's second-term project as a genuine rupture rather than a passing storm: a negative-sum, socially baseless populism (372) sustained by bullying as a mode of power (350), defaulting to racist xenophobia where ordinary political economy loses traction (388, 390). He reads the 2024 win as the consolidation of an anti-Professional-Managerial-Class revolt (336, 332) inside a near-50/50 dealigned electorate, maps the contending MAGA camps and the 'flooding the zone' radicalization of the second term (361), and takes Trumpian 'futurism' - Musk's rockets, tariff-as-sacrifice - seriously as a politics of the future the Democrats abandoned (380, 381). The cluster supplies the conceptual vocabulary (anti-PMC coalition, hustle after hegemony, bullying, negative-sum populism) that anchors his whole reading of the present American conjuncture, extending to the coercion of universities and law firms and the 'iterations of the unstate' (362, 366, 399).
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Jul 21, 2024
Tooze dissolves the apparent contradictions of JD Vance's worker-populist-meets-venture-capital posture into a coalition-building logic, arguing Trump-Vance money comes from 'personalistic' billionaire capital (especially anti-big-tech Silicon Valley VCs like Thiel and a16z) rather than corporate America, united around crypto, anti-trust against incumbent platforms, and opposition to taxing unrealized gains. He stresses these factions represent only a sliver of tech and wealth, and that actual policy fights over tariffs, immigration and the dollar lie ahead. A useful, empirically grounded map of GOP economic factionalism.
Republican economicsJD Vanceventure capitalpolitical coalitionsanti-trust
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Oct 2, 2024
A landmark numbered essay arguing that US presidential elections come down to roughly 150,000 voters in a handful of swing counties, and proposing an original three-theory framework to explain swing states: 'purple voters' (distinct electorates), 'incomplete sorting' (red/blue voters thrown together by accident), and 'states of change' (structural economic shifts). Tooze grounds each theory in commentary and Bloomberg county-level data on housing costs, deindustrialization, and migration, offering a durable analytic lens on the structure of American democracy.
US electionsswing stateselectoral frameworkpolitical economyBidenomics
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Oct 12, 2024
In Hegemony note 9, Tooze argues the striking feature of the Trump clan's self-dealing (Truth Social, crypto/World Liberty Financial, Kushner's Gulf-funded Affinity Partners) is how overt yet petty it is relative to the kleptocracy of true global corruption, and how disproportionate the liberal outcry is. He reads the triad of overt networking, small stakes, and outsized outrage as a symptom of hegemony degenerating into 'hustle'. A distinctive conceptual framing, though more reflective essay than landmark.
Trump businesseshegemonycorruptionTruth SocialKushner Affinity
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Nov 5, 2024
An annotated chronological retrospective stitching together Tooze's own four years of commentary on the Biden presidency, organized as a guided reading list with context notes — from the 2017 National Security Strategy shock through the IRA's 'climate revolution in fiscal policy', the China-decoupling escalation, and the 'controlled demolition' of the post-Cold War order. It frames Bidenism as a one-term project and is a valuable index/map of his Biden-era writing, though much of the substance lives in the linked pieces rather than here.
Biden administrationBidenomicsIRAUS-China policyretrospective
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Nov 10, 2024
A substantive essay arguing Trump's 2024 win was both an anti-incumbent COVID-inflation backlash (mild by global standards) and the culmination of a cumulative radicalization of the GOP, marked by a class/education/spatial realignment: affluent and college-educated voters shifting Democratic while sub-$50k and rural voters swung sharply to Trump. The striking conclusion is that Democrats now win the counties producing most US GDP yet are failing disadvantaged Americans, while Trump's coalition will be hurt most by his own policies. A landmark synthesis with lasting reference value on the post-2024 realignment.
2024 electionGOP radicalizationclass realignmenteducation divideAmerican democracy
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Nov 26, 2024
Tooze argues Trump's 2024 win was no realignment landslide (a near-50/50 dealignment) but is best understood through a revolt against the Professional Managerial Class rather than a workers-vs-owners frame, mapping how anti-PMC sentiment binds Latino men, non-college white women, evangelicals, the petit-bourgeois gentry, hedge funds, and fossil-fuel interests against a Democratic coalition personified by Clinton and Harris. He warns the besetting error of both camps is failing to grasp that crises are 'PMC moments' and that modern society cannot function without the expertise the right now disdains. A signature original framework with lasting interpretive value for US political economy.
PMCTrump 2024class politicsUS political economyChartbook essay
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Feb 7, 2025
An original short conceptual essay theorizing bullying as a distinct mode of power amid the onslaught of Trump's first weeks: transgressive, humiliation-seeking, license-dependent, and parasitic on its victims, distinct from authoritarianism or tyranny. Drawing on the Hegel/Kojeve master-slave dialectic, Tooze frames bullying as a 'degenerate' form that smashes rather than builds order; it matters as a framework for reading Trumpian governance.
political theoryTrumppowerHegelauthoritarianism
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Mar 9, 2025
A numbered essay contrasting Joseph Nye's episodic/cyclical reading of US soft power (Trump as a passing bad season) with Tooze's developmental, path-dependent view in which the liberal-globalist coalition has structurally collapsed since well before 2016. Drawing on encounters with Biden-era elites (Sullivan, Tai), Tooze argues Bidenomics was "MAGA for thinking people" and that both parties are now trapped in their own mythologies. A sharp argument about how historical narration shapes political diagnosis.
soft powerUS hegemonyDemocratic elitesBidenomicshistorical method
TIER 4
Mar 15, 2025
Tooze's nine-point stocktaking of Trump 2.0's first 54 days argues this term is the real radicalization Trump 1.0 only foreshadowed, mapping the four contending camps (Trump, nationalist populists, techno-libertarians, MAGA Republicans) and locating the weakly-anchored 'MAGA for thinking people' Mar-a-Lago/Pettis current within them. He reframes the movement as an anti-Professional-Managerial-Class revolt rather than an attack on reason per se, and confronts the open-ended dread of 'Trump-time' with a pandemic-era analogy.
Trump 2.0flooding the zoneMar-a-Lago Accordanti-PMC politicspolycrisis
TIER 4
Mar 16, 2025
Tooze frames and reproduces a Columbia Law faculty memo rebutting the Trump administration's March 13 demand letter, which froze ~$400m in grants and conditioned 'negotiations' on intrusive changes to governance, admissions, and academic departments. The memo argues the letter itself violates Title VI's standards, procedures, and remedies as well as First Amendment academic freedom, vagueness, and due-process protections — a useful reference document on the legal stakes of federal coercion against universities.
Columbia Universityacademic freedomTitle VITrump higher edconstitutional law
TIER 5
Mar 19, 2025
Tooze's landmark argument that the commentariat's eager engagement with the 'Mar-a-Lago Accord' is a form of intellectual Stockholm syndrome — the conviction that 'something must be done' (about deindustrialization à la Klein-Pettis, or about US debt) makes serious people sane-wash Trump's economic chaos. He offers four anti-sanewashing readings (5D-chess wealth transfer, deliberate debtor-on-creditor coercion, crypto/gold grift, and brute tariff-man instinct), warning that conventional realism here becomes escapism.
Mar-a-Lago Accordsanewashingdollar policytrade deficitsTrump economics
TIER 5
Mar 27, 2025
Tooze offers an original three-dimensional framework for the Trump attack on Columbia, rejecting both the 'comparative authoritarianism' and 'constitutional free-speech' framings as evasive. He argues the crisis is the nationally-specific unravelling of the 1990s globalization model along three fault lines — the collapse of the two-state solution, the MAGA assault exposing the campus left's actual marginality, and the broken authority of 'big science' — then extends the logic to predict a coming China-US deglobalization shock to a university now deeply dependent on Chinese students. A landmark synthetic essay with lasting reference value.
Columbia UniversitypolycrisisglobalizationIsrael-PalestineChina decoupling
TIER 4
Mar 29, 2025
Prompted by Trump's executive orders targeting firms like Paul Weiss, Tooze examines the political economy of American 'BigLaw' — its history from white-shoe firms and the Cravath System through the cutthroat, profits-per-partner boom from the 1970s on. He reads the orders as personal grievance dressed as policy (the EOs literally feature the word 'me'), resolved into a golf chat and a deal while the rest of the pack is put on notice. A substantive original essay on power, law firms, and Trumpian coercion.
BigLawTrump executive ordersPaul Weisslegal professionpolitical economy
TIER 5
Apr 11, 2025
Tooze builds an original typology of populisms (positive-sum a la Nazi/New Deal recovery, zero-sum redistributive left, zero-sum reactionary right a la Mussolini/Thatcher) and argues Trump's tariff campaign fits none: it is 'negative-sum populism' with no real social base, destruction promised in the name of a reindustrialization that most Americans neither want nor would benefit from. He reads it as US political culture detached from social reality, with the empire's 'create our own reality' delirium come home. A landmark conceptual essay.
populismTrumptariffsreindustrializationpolitical economy
TIER 4
May 6, 2025
Part 1 challenges the left's 'end times fascism' reading (Klein/Taylor) by arguing Trumpism appeals precisely because, unlike the timid Democrats, it offers a politics of the future. Using Jonathan White's framework (critique, collectivity, sacrifice), Tooze reads Trump's tariff agenda as a gendered rhetoric of sacrifice ('fewer Barbie dolls') that is bolder about demanding consumer sacrifice for a manufacturing future than Bidenomics or the Green New Deal ever dared. A provocative reframing of Trumpism.
Trumpismpolitics of the futuretariffsend times fascismindustrial policy
TIER 4
May 7, 2025
Part 2 of the futurism series argues the left's contempt for Musk (Klein/Taylor's 'end times fascism') is an evasion: Musk genuinely fused a material transformation project with cultural and political heft, first via Tesla and now decisively via SpaceX's launch dominance (seven times the rest of the world's tonnage in H1 2024) and the Starlink/Golden Dome economics. Tooze's point is that dismissing space launch as 'cronyism and space junk' makes it impossible to talk seriously about the politics of the future.
MuskSpaceXGolden Domepolitics of the futureTrumpism
TIER 4
Jun 6, 2025
Tooze's thesis is that both Trump's tariffs and the "Big Beautiful Bill" exist in a political vacuum: aggressive, large-scale policies that no powerful interest group actually demands, sustained only by Trump's grip on a coalition too loosely bound to cohere. He reads the Musk blow-up, the Federalist Society rift over tariff authority, and Oren Cass's "death march" framing as evidence that where ordinary political economy loses traction, the GOP defaults to racist xenophobia (Stephen Miller's immigration framing) as its unifying glue.
TrumpBig Beautiful BilltariffsUS political economyFederalist Society
TIER 4
Jun 10, 2025
Tooze reads the June 2025 Marine deployment to LA through his Chartbook 388 thesis that Trump's politically thin signature policies (tariffs, the Big Beautiful Bill) push the coalition toward racist xenophobia and confrontation as the unifying glue, with Stephen Miller explicitly linking ICE escalation to the BBB's $140bn enforcement funding. He benchmarks the moment against ACLED's data on the overwhelmingly peaceful but heavily repressed 2020 BLM protests to gauge how far escalation could run into the No Kings weekend. A sharp political-economy-of-repression analysis, though tied to a fast-moving news moment.
Trump administrationimmigration/ICEBLM protestspolitical escalationBig Beautiful Bill
TIER 5
Jun 13, 2025
Tooze exposes a 'jaw-dropping literature' in which the insurance industry (Verisk/PCS, Synthetik's SRCC Quantum Tool) statistically models and prices strikes, riots, and civil commotion in the US, simulating thousands of unrest scenarios down to the ZIP-code level to estimate a hypothetical 1-in-1,000-year event ten times worse than the 2020 BLM protests. The piece shows how post-BLM correlated losses turned American political polarization into an insurable, commodified catastrophe risk. An original, memorable reframing of how finance prepares to profit from civil disorder.
insurance modelingcivil unrestBLMcatastrophe riskpolitical economy
TIER 4
Jun 29, 2025
Tooze reads Mamdani's victory through New York City's extreme socio-economic structure: a Gini of 0.55 (Rio-level), surging top-end incomes against static low-wage growth, a hollowed-out middle, and roughly a fifth of residents in poverty, half of those in deep poverty. He argues the city is one of the few US arenas where the classic capitalism-vs-democracy distributional conflict is still live, making Mamdani's affordability agenda a rare sign of democratic hope.
NYC inequalityMamdanicapitalism and democracyGiniaffordability
TIER 4
Jun 30, 2025
Tooze argues Mamdani's Democratic-primary upset was driven by an unprecedented surge in young-voter registration (roughly 3x as many 18-24 year-olds as 2021) channeling a youth revolt over affordability and Gaza, and calls for a finer class anatomy of NYC than Florida's creative/service/working-class schema or simple income deciles. A thoughtful methodological plea for Bourdieusian class analysis of the city's politics.
MamdaniNYC politicsyouth voteclass analysismiddle class
TIER 4
Jul 24, 2025
Building on David Pozen's analysis of Columbia's settlement as 'regulation by deal,' Tooze reframes it as ad hoc 'governance' and argues the coercive, extralegal dealmaking is not an aberration from a liberal rule-of-law order but a structural feature of modern American (and Western) power. He invokes Franz Neumann's 'unstate' and Benhabib's 'democratic iterations' to coin 'iterations of the unstate,' insisting this isn't fascism but actually-existing liberal modernity.
Columbia UniversityTrump administrationrule of lawregulation by dealacademic freedom
TIER 4
Nov 9, 2025
A substantive analytical essay reading Mamdani's NYC mayoral win as the product of a decade of post-Occupy left organizing plus a genuine, data-backed affordability crisis (falling real wages, >half of New Yorkers poor or low-income, Wall Street bonuses at record highs). Tooze argues Mamdani's modest, 'deliverable' agenda (free buses, childcare, rent stabilization) will be decided by NYC/Albany fiscal politics and whether a socialist can run the city without fiscal collapse. Matters as a careful case study of cost-of-living politics and the test for reviving American social democracy.
Mamdani NYCaffordabilitysocial democracyurban inequalityfiscal politics
TIER 4
Dec 19, 2025
Tooze reads the 2025 Trump National Security Strategy as dividing the world into three zones—a proprietary Western hemisphere (Monroe doctrine 'Trump corollary'), great-power bargaining with China and Russia stripped of ideological heat, and Europe as the one arena where MAGA pours its ideological energy because it treats European far-right struggles as its own domestic battle. The deeper point: unlike the 1945-89 Cold War, today's MAGA is not 'pro-American' in any traditional Atlanticist sense and is fighting to smash the liberal East-coast image of America that anchored old transatlantic ties. A substantive interpretive essay on the logic of Trumpian grand strategy.
National Security StrategyTrump foreign policyCold WarEurope-US relationsMAGA
TIER 4
Jan 22, 2026
An impressionistic, literary first-person reportage from Davos rendering the MAGA delegation's intimidation as a visceral, abusive dynamic—'strip mall patriotism,' the boastful 'hammer,' a CEO coaching Tooze that 'they will beat up on you... you will settle on a spectrum of terms that they dictate.' Less analysis than diary, but a striking eyewitness account of the affective texture of coercive American power abroad ('a rupture, not a transition').
Davos/WEFMAGApolitical culturereportageintimidation
TIER 4
Feb 3, 2026
A substantive numbered Chartbook essay using the released Epstein-Summers correspondence (Nov-Dec 2018) to interrogate what "polycrisis" and "rupture" actually mean, juxtaposing Summers' celebrated Washington Post column on living with China's rise against his simultaneous Epstein texts to argue the establishment's supposed lines of decorum were thoroughly blurred. Tooze proposes that the present condition is less a clean "rupture" (Carney's Davos framing) than something disorienting and incontinent, gender and power inseparable from policy analysis. An original, provocative cultural-political reading rather than a charts post.
polycrisisEpstein-SummersUS-Chinaelite powerneoliberal order
TIER 4
Jun 6, 2026
A genuine numbered Chartbook essay in which Tooze, reflecting on a Berlin panel on 'Crisis and Transformation', argues that invoking 20th-century precedents (municipal socialism, price stabilization, EU regulation) is borderline nostalgic given how ruptured the present feels — he reframes 'what time is it?' as a question about the 'timbre' of overlapping temporalities. The urgency centers on AI as the driving force of US capital accumulation since 2022, citing Nordhaus's 'euthanasia of the labouring classes', Ferguson/Lowenstein's 'are we the horses?', and historic stock-market concentration, with Mann's Magic Mountain preface framing the sense of historical rupture. Tooze's own framework-flavored reflection, of lasting interpretive interest.
polycrisisAI and capitalismhistorical rupturetemporalitystock concentration
Energy Transition, Climate & the Electrostate
7 tier-5 · 4 tier-4
Tooze's climate writing centers on one claim: the global green transition is overwhelmingly China's story, and the right frame is electrification, not 'transition.' He argues energy sources historically accumulate rather than replace, so decarbonization is genuinely unprecedented (347); China supplies two-thirds of new wind and solar (386) in a build-out bigger than the Marshall Plan (409), inseparable from a politics of state power the West is too tongue-tied to name (414). He puts the 'unipolar epoch' of climate politics in its place (316), reframes the electrostate-vs-petrostate binary (439), weighs the cost of decarbonization and the limits of climate policy under either US party (303, 329, 563-issue), tracks China's decisive NDC (324), and follows the gas-turbine bottleneck choking the data-center demand surge (turbine issue). The cluster is the most coherent available account of the political economy of the energy transition.
TIER 4
Aug 1, 2024
Tooze quantifies how much a Trump victory would actually change US emissions, synthesizing Carbon Brief, Wood Mackenzie and EIA models to conclude it would add roughly 4GtCO2e by 2030 yet only slow rather than reverse decarbonization, because market prices for solar, wind and batteries drive the trend more than policy does. The deeper argument is that even the IRA leaves the US far off any net-zero path, and that the fracking-fueled oil and gas complex remains untouched by either party. A substantive, model-grounded explainer of the limits of climate politics.
climate policyUS election 2024IRAenergy transitionemissions modeling
TIER 5
Sep 9, 2024
Tooze argues that the Western-centric, 'capitalism vs. ExxonMobil' framing of the climate crisis is a relic of the 1990s unipolar moment, and that emissions have long been driven by a polycentric 'mixed economy of energy.' Using the IPCC's 1990 and 1992 reference scenarios—which correctly foresaw a 'centrally planned' bloc (then Soviet, now China) rivaling the West—he shows that today's China-pivoted, multipolar climate reality is structurally normal, not anomalous. An original reframing of climate political economy with lasting interpretive value.
climate politicsChina emissionsIPCC scenariospolycentric energycapitalocene critique
TIER 5
Oct 6, 2024
Tooze argues China is the decisive variable for the global climate (over 30% of emissions, 90% of post-Paris growth) and lays out, via CREA and Carbon Brief data, what its February 2025 NDC and 15th Five-Year Plan must deliver: a real ~30% emissions cut by 2035, 5000 GW of clean capacity, expanded ETS, electric-arc steel and EVs. He weighs whether 2024's 83% cut in coal-power permitting and record renewables buildout mark the moment Chinese emissions peak. A landmark reference piece on the single most important climate-policy decision.
China emissionsNDCdecarbonizationsolar and coalclimate policy
TIER 4
Oct 23, 2024
A substantive Chartbook/Carbon Notes essay arguing that the climate near-silence in the 2024 US campaign conceals a real, bipartisan 'energy-growth consensus' ('more, more, more' energy) in which both Harris and Trump embrace record fossil-fuel output even as renewables, EVs, batteries, and nuclear surge. Tooze names an emerging 'Big Tent IRA' coalition of big tech, AI, nuclear and new energy and argues the energy transition is advancing regardless of who wins, but should not be confused with a coherent climate policy.
climate politicsUS energy transitionfracking/fossil fuelsnuclear/IRA2024 election
TIER 4
Nov 17, 2024
A Top Links issue whose centerpiece is a strong climate-economics argument: standard IPCC models overestimate growth, and once you net out the fossil investment that would happen anyway, decarbonizing to 2C costs only ~0.5% of global GDP per year more than a 'do almost nothing' 3C path. It also covers European stocks lagging Wall Street by a record margin on the Trump trade and the enduring communist insurgency in the Philippines. The energy-transition cost reframing has real reference value beyond a typical roundup.
energy transitionclimate economicsTrump tradeEuropean stocksPhilippines insurgency
TIER 5
Jan 22, 2025
A landmark Carbon Notes essay arguing (via Fressoz, Christophers and On Barak) that energy 'transitions' are a misleading frame: historically energy sources accumulate and agglomerate rather than replace each other, so decarbonization is genuinely unprecedented rather than a repeat of past sectoral shifts. China's coal-powered post-1990 growth is the dramatic proof that the transition model fails at the global level, making the decarbonization project radical and Asia-led. Offers a durable conceptual framework for thinking about energy history and climate policy.
energy transitionclimate policyenergy historycoalChina
TIER 5
May 19, 2025
Using IRENA data, Tooze argues the global renewables 'transition' is overwhelmingly one country's story: China accounted for roughly two-thirds of new wind and solar capacity in 2023-24, while the US never led and managed under 8% even under Biden's IRA. He lays out a three-phase periodization (European leadership to 2011, Chinese takeover in the 2010s, super-rapid post-2020 boom) and notes Chinese CO2 emissions may finally be peaking. An original analytical framework with strong reference value.
energy transitionChinasolar/windclimateelectricity
TIER 4
Jun 11, 2025
A Top Links issue elevated by two strong long excerpts: a Heat Map piece on the gas-turbine bottleneck, where GE Vernova and rivals keep capital discipline and order backlogs to 2029+, choking the data-center-driven 16% electricity-demand surge and undermining both gas and renewables ('none of the above'); and Runciman's LRB review of Slobodian's Hayek's Bastards, on how 'paleolibertarian' neoliberals turned to tribal/racial hierarchy against the solidaristic globalism Davos had embraced. Substantive energy-system and political-economy reading.
gas turbineselectricity demandenergy transitionneoliberalism/Hayekdata centers
TIER 5
Sep 19, 2025
Tooze argues that China's solar buildout (250+ GW installed in H1 2025, ~1,200 GW/yr of manufacturing capacity built on ~$50bn of subsidies) is a world-historical industrial policy of greater consequence than the Marshall Plan, and the planet's only realistic path to climate stabilization. He reframes Western complaints about 'overcapacity' as a category error and casts cheap Chinese panels/batteries flooding Asia and Africa as a general-purpose technology proliferating at planetary scale. A landmark framing piece with lasting reference value.
China solarindustrial policyenergy transitionclimateelectrostate
TIER 5
Nov 2, 2025
A landmark essay arguing that China's world-changing solar/battery build-out (now 50% more PV capacity than an optimized Net Zero path requires) is inseparably a 'power move' with a politics the Western climate community is too tongue-tied to discuss. Tooze maps that politics across output legitimacy for the CCP, the silencing of autonomous environmentalism, energy planning as spatial state-building in Xinjiang and Tibet, extractivism, and the geopolitical leverage (grid interconnection, inverter 'kill switches') of an electrostate. Original framework with lasting reference value on how to talk about China's green dominance honestly.
China energy transitionsolar PVclimate geopoliticselectrostateXinjiang Tibet
TIER 5
Apr 2, 2026
A full numbered Chartbook essay arguing that the fashionable electrostate-vs-petrostate binary is conceptually sloppy: being an electrostate reflects governmental and economic rationality (electrify everything) rather than factor endowments, so any economy including the US can choose it, while "petrostate" properly denotes rent-dependence at low development levels and fits the US poorly. Tooze's key move is that what makes the US a unique "closed petrostate" candidate is its outsized oil demand (~20% of world consumption), which uniquely lets it politically choose to freeze the 20th-century hydrocarbon model rather than electrify. A landmark framework piece with lasting reference value.
electrostate vs petrostateenergy transitionUS energy policyoil demandclimate economy
The Fed, Central Banking & Financial Markets
5 tier-5 · 13 tier-4
Two strands run together: the assault on Fed independence and the mechanics of financial fragility. Tooze reads Trump's moves against Powell and Lisa Cook (406, 425, 376) and the Warsh agenda (444) as forcing a long-deferred question of a democratic politics of central banking, ties Fed independence to 1940s-style fiscal pressures and the bond-market 'Big One,' and extends the argument to the Bank of England and the 'haunted house' of British politics (449). The markets strand explains the August 2024 yen-carry unwind (305), the Treasury escalation sequence and basis-trade plumbing of April 2025 (369-crisis, 370), the 2025 equity-and-gold 'melt up' inside a K-shaped balance sheet (422), long-run equity history (308), the inflation-perception gap (327), and the Davos question of whether convened capital can still constrain politics (428, 431). The cluster is Tooze's bridge between monetary institutions and market structure.
TIER 4
Jul 27, 2024
Tooze argues the so-called first 'Silicon Valley election' is really narrower: a partisan crypto revolt against Biden-Gensler regulation, with Trump flipping from calling crypto a scam to courting it at the Nashville Bitcoin conference and entertaining a federal bitcoin reserve. He frames crypto's libertarian, anti-state ideology as a natural fit for the GOP mood while Harris merely seeks a low-key 'reset' with the broader tech sector. A sharp political-economy read on money, regulation and the 2024 donor landscape.
crypto politicsUS election 2024Bitcoin reserveSilicon Valleyfinancial regulation
TIER 4
Aug 5, 2024
A clear explainer of the August 2024 global selloff as the unwinding of the yen carry trade: diverging US-Japan monetary policy (BoJ hike vs expected Fed cuts) reversed the cheap-yen funding trade, the yen's surge forced margin calls and amplifying feedback loops, and Japan's Topix fell 12%, its worst since 1987. Tooze offers six 'pointers' for gauging how far the unwind might spread (shadow-bank positioning, EM exposure, credit vs equity, bitcoin's non-hedge status). A strong, accessible mechanics-of-the-crisis piece.
yen-carry-trademonetary-policyJapanFXleverage
TIER 4
Aug 12, 2024
Using 125 years of data from the Dimson-Marsh-Staunton Investment Returns Yearbook, Tooze sets the August 2024 sell-off in long-run perspective: US equity dominance is actually less pronounced than in the 1950s-60s, markets are more sectorally diversified than the rail-and-bank era of 1900, and 'boring' old-economy stocks (tobacco, railways) have historically beaten tech-chasing. He links current volatility-trade unwinds to the reflexive, financialized structure of modern markets. A useful explainer grounding present turmoil in deep history.
equity-historystock-volatilityfinancializationmarket-concentrationlong-run-returns
TIER 4
Oct 16, 2024
Tooze resolves his own dissonance between benign macro inflation data and the painful experience of grocery and fuel prices by adopting John Authers' 'anti-core' index (food plus energy), which shows the 2021-22 shock was worse on those essentials than the 1973 oil crisis. He argues the Fed and statistical agencies should publish a 'felt inflation' measure alongside core to close the trust gap between technocratic numbers and lived experience. A useful, well-argued reframing of why public economic sentiment diverges from the data.
inflationanti-core indexfelt inflationFed communicationpublic sentiment
TIER 4
Nov 8, 2024
A Top Links issue led by Powell's forceful post-election defense of Fed independence (refusing to resign, asserting Trump lacks authority to fire him) and Adam Posen's framing of R&D, defense and investment spending as 'expensive lottery tickets' Europe risks foregoing. Its strongest item is the analysis of China's $1.3bn Chancay deepwater megaport in Peru as a potential dual-use naval facility within the BRI's strategic geography, plus Pakistan's hollow new counterterror operation. The Fed-independence and Chancay material gives it more analytical weight than a routine roundup.
Fed independenceindustrial policyChancay portChina Belt and RoadPakistan counterinsurgency
TIER 4
Jan 17, 2025
A substantive numbered essay defending the 2021 Democratic fiscal stimulus against post-election 'overcorrection,' arguing the US achieved earlier disinflation, stronger growth and real-wage gains than G7 peers while a contractionary alternative would have cost 9-15mn jobs. Tooze adds that partisan inflation expectations (Republicans' unanchored) make 'de-anchoring' fears effectively a politics of confidence directed at the right. A strong analytical defense of bold fiscal policy with a notable point on the politicization of inflation expectations.
US fiscal policyinflationYellenPhillips curveinflation expectations
TIER 4
Apr 7, 2025
Amid the post-Liberation Day selloff, Tooze argues the market to watch is not equities but bonds — above all the $28tn Treasury market, which simultaneously functions as safe haven, political target, and piggy-bank. He lays out a step-by-step escalation sequence (equity panic -> Treasury selling -> safe-haven flip -> Fed intervention -> dollar flight) that could turn a correction into a genuine dollar crisis, while judging the worst outcome unlikely. A useful explainer of Treasury-market mechanics and the conditions that distinguish functional repricing from systemic meltdown.
Treasury marketfinancial crisisTrump tariffsdollarFed
TIER 4
Apr 9, 2025
A real-time but structurally rich explainer of the feared Treasury-market unwind: the March-2020 'sell-everything' script, hedge-fund basis-trade liquidation (~$800bn exposure, 50-100x leverage), the insider/outsider knowledge hierarchy, and the Stuart Hall 'spiral of signification' framing of financial panic as a self-fulfilling moral panic. A useful reference on how Treasury liquidity crises and basis trades actually work.
Treasury marketbasis tradehedge fundsliquidity crisisFed
TIER 5
Apr 12, 2025
Tooze advances an original four-stage framework borrowed from emerging-market crises: shares sell, then bonds, then the dollar ('sell America'), and finally 'stage 4' where a populist leader tears away the veil of market neutrality and politicizes finance. He documents the simultaneous Treasury/dollar selloff, de-dollarization commentary, and three forms of US market politicization (Dimon lobbyism, MAGA backlash, liberal self-censorship), arguing the dollar system's legitimacy is fraying. A durable analytical lens on Trump-era financial politics.
Treasury marketde-dollarizationtariffsfinancial politicsdollar hegemony
TIER 4
Apr 17, 2025
A numbered Chartbook essay arguing that Trump's call to "terminate" Powell is less the immediate danger than the legal campaign to overturn Humphrey's Executor (1935) and dismantle independent-agency protections via the unitary-executive theory. The real threat to Fed independence comes obliquely through the FTC/NLRB removal cases, where dismissed commissioners deliberately invoke the Fed to raise their own stakes — the "800-pound gorilla" the Supreme Court has so far been unwilling to expose.
Fed independencePowelladministrative stateHumphrey's Executormonetary policy
TIER 5
Aug 26, 2025
Sparked by Trump's attempt to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook 'for cause,' Tooze argues the liberal 'our democracy / I'm Spartacus' reaction is both silly (the Fed is a deeply undemocratic, business-dominated institution) and painfully true (the PMC's authority really is under asymmetric, ruthless attack, as the killing of Sarah Bloom Raskin's nomination showed). He contends central-bank independence orthodoxy rests on panels of small countries irrelevant to the US 'whale in the bathtub,' and that MAGA's aggression is forcing the long-deferred question of a genuinely democratic politics of central banking. A landmark essay tying monetary institutions to the legitimacy crisis of US democracy.
Fed independenceLisa Cookcentral bankingdemocratic politicsTrump
TIER 4
Dec 29, 2025
Numbered essay dissecting the historically unprecedented simultaneous 2025 bubble in US equities and gold (first co-occurrence in 50 years per the BIS), weighing Sharma's catch-all 'liquidity' thesis against Perkins's endogenous-money critique and BIS evidence that retail investors are buying both while institutions sell. Tooze's value-add is locating this 'melt up' inside the balance sheets of the top 20% K-shaped asset-owning class. A substantive, well-sourced macro-finance argument.
asset bubblesgold and equitiesliquidityhyperfinancializationK-shaped economy
TIER 5
Jan 12, 2026
A substantive essay on the Trump administration's threat of criminal investigation against Fed Chair Powell, asking whether this is the long-awaited bond-market 'Big One' or merely culture-war authoritarianism that markets shrug off. Tooze's key insight is the nihilism diagnosis: that markets ignoring a transparent attempt to coerce the Fed reveals a deeper collapse of US elite coherence around institutions, where only flows of money and power matter, and ties Fed independence to fiscal pressures echoing the 1940s Treasury-Fed conflict.
Federal Reservecentral bank independenceTrump administrationbond marketspolitical economy
TIER 4
Jan 20, 2026
Writing live from Davos, Tooze frames the WEF through two competing reads—Goodman/Blyth's 'death of Davos' irrelevance thesis versus the FT's account of a Fink/BlackRock-driven resurgence—to pose the real question: in the MAGA moment, can convened global capital and big tech form any counterweight to a pro-business administration whose chaotic trade, foreign, and Fed policies even business has no interest in. A clear-eyed essay on whether market/elite logic can still constrain political radicalization.
Davos/WEFBlackRockMAGAGreenlandpolitical economy
TIER 4
Jan 24, 2026
Tooze's wrap-up of Davos 2026 proposes a triadic framework—convening (BlackRock/Fink assembling capital), staging (WEF's semi-public theater of attention), and acting (politicians, mainly Europeans, delivering the actual counter to MAGA)—to explain how the Forum produces real effects despite capital's public silence. He then floats that the week's deeper stakes may have been the Fed chairmanship (Rieder/Warsh vs Hassett) rather than Greenland. A sharp original lens on how elite forums exert anonymous-vs-targeted pressure.
Davos/WEFBlackRockFed independenceMAGApolitical economy
TIER 5
May 2, 2026
Tooze profiles Kevin Warsh, the presumptive new Fed chair, arguing his agenda is less about technical monetary policy than about aligning the Fed with the conservative campaign to roll back the administrative state, traced through his Hoover Institution ties and speeches invoking the Enlightenment, anti-Wilsonianism, and G2 rivalry with China. Close reading of Warsh's G30 speech decodes dog whistles on climate, 'inclusive employment' (black unemployment), and individualism. A rich, original intellectual portrait with lasting reference value for understanding the Trump-era Fed.
Federal ReserveKevin Warshmonetary policyconservatismadministrative state
TIER 4
May 10, 2026
Tooze diagnoses the "spectacular cognitive dissonance" of spring 2026: Brent near $100 and a closed Strait of Hormuz coexisting with record S&P highs driven by a handful of AI stocks, an increasingly K-shaped economy, and a self-feeding big-tech/AI nexus propping up its own balance sheets. He reads the complacency through Gopinath's "Bliss trade" of structural moral hazard, warning the standoff could morph into synchronized stock-and-bond sell-offs. A sharp, well-sourced state-of-the-economy essay, though it leans heavily on Gopinath and Wigglesworth.
US economyAI bubblecognitive dissonancemoral hazardIran war
TIER 5
May 15, 2026
Tooze argues that the UK's fear of the "bond market" is misplaced: bond markets are not an irresistible objective force but a function of how the central bank chooses to handle them, as the contrasting fates of Italy (Trichet's cat-and-mouse vs Draghi's "whatever it takes") and Britain's 2022 gilt crisis demonstrate. The unspeakable variable is the Bank of England itself, and he renews his call for a new government-Bank concordat (alongside PR electoral reform and reopening EU membership) to break the haunted-house paralysis of British politics. A landmark synthesis of monetary politics, central-bank independence, and the Eurozone crisis with lasting reference value.
Bank of Englandbond marketsEurozone crisiscentral bank independenceUK political economy
War Economies, Military Power & Defense
5 tier-5 · 7 tier-4
Tooze brings economic history to bear on the return of war. He dismantles the 'starved European militaries' narrative - $3.1tn over a decade buying fragmented 'zombie armies' (389) - and the false 1930s 'war economy' analogy for 3-4% rearmament (360), using Germany's decayed railways as a lens on lost hard-power capacity (354). The 2025 Iran-Israel war is read as a geo-militarily unprecedented missile-and-anti-missile contest (392), with running cost accounting and the drone-vs-interceptor cost asymmetry (Iran-war issues). The Russia war-economy essay rejects the 'house of cards' story for a structural-stagnation diagnosis (345), while the critical-minerals, energy-dominance and military-Keynesianism pieces price the economics of rearmament (Ukraine-minerals issue, energy-dominance issue). The cluster is a corrective to both alarmism and complacency about military power.
TIER 5
Jan 14, 2025
A landmark essay dismantling the Western 'house of cards' narrative about Russia's war economy, arguing the real question is long-run structural strength, not the performative invocation of imminent financial collapse. Tooze synthesizes Kennedy, Sandbu, Prokopenko, Inozemtsev and Feygin to show war-Keynesian 'deathonomics' has driven full employment and rising bottom-decile incomes, while sanctions failed to constrain energy revenues—the binding constraint is stagnation and lost flexibility, not a sudden crisis. A definitive, balanced reference on Russian war-economy debates.
Russia war economysanctionswar KeynesianisminflationUkraine war
TIER 4
Feb 19, 2025
A substantive Top Links issue: an FT-sourced reality check on Ukraine's much-hyped ~$11.5tn critical-mineral deposits (mostly unexplored, data Soviet-era, ~20% under Russian control) and Trump's $500bn resource demand that European officials likened to mafia blackmail. It pairs this with a Chicago-school AEA study finding men at high gun-violence risk earn near minimum wage in both legal and criminal work, and Rana Mitter's review of Megan Greene's book on Nationalist China's wartime science-and-planning capacity that shaped both the PRC and Taiwan.
Ukraine critical mineralsTrump resource diplomacyeconomics of crimewartime China / sciencerare earths
TIER 5
Feb 21, 2025
A landmark numbered Chartbook essay using Germany's decayed railways as a lens on collective self-disempowerment: FT data on 1.9bn arrivals show German intercity punctuality is worse than even Britain's maligned system, the product of surging demand plus decades of debt-brake underinvestment. Tooze then links this to hard power—via Moltke-era rail logistics history—arguing the Bundesbahn can move only ~1.5 armored brigades, leaving Germany unable to serve as NATO's Mittellage staging hub (US ammo for Ukraine was once stranded in depot), a striking case of a state abandoning core capacities.
German railwaysinfrastructure investmentNATO logisticsmilitary historyZeitenwende
TIER 4
Feb 22, 2025
An analytically strong Top Links issue: a Gavekal note explains the paradox of US "energy dominance"—adding 3mn bpd-equivalent is feasible, but at current prices drilling barely breaks even, so lower consumer prices and global dominance are in tension. A Bloomberg Economics analysis quantifies European "military Keynesianism," showing a debt-financed rise to 3.5% of GDP yields only ~0.6% extra output by 2028 because most kit is bought from the US, unless the EU builds its own defense industry. Rounded out with Sam Greene on Russian public opinion and King Charles dropping champagne warrants.
US energy dominanceoil & gas economicsEuropean rearmamentmilitary KeynesianismRussian public opinion
TIER 5
Mar 12, 2025
A numbered essay arguing that invoking 1930s Nazi rearmament and "war economies" as the reference point for European defense today is a misleading historical mirage; classic total mobilization meant 30-40% of GDP, whereas Germany debating 3-4% is just a return to NATO-era normality. Tooze marshals Harrison/Broadberry mobilization data and Bundeswehr history to show West Germany was always a normal armed power, and that matching a Russia spending under 10% of GDP needs smart industrial policy, not total mobilization. A landmark explainer that supplies durable conceptual reference value for current rearmament debates.
war economyrearmamentGermany defenseeconomic historypolycrisis
TIER 5
Jun 8, 2025
Tooze dismantles the 'starved European militaries' narrative: non-US NATO spent $3.1tn over a decade (and $8.9tn from 1991-2021) yet fields 1.3-1.4 million troops split across 29 fragmented forces with little combat power, overspending on personnel/salaries and underinvesting in hardware. Drawing on Bruegel research, he shows national procurement preferences create small runs, higher unit costs, and uncompetitive contractors (Rheinmetall ranked 28th globally in 2022), and argues the waste had a conservative logic of 'zombie armies' preserving the fiction of sovereignty. A reference-grade reframing of European defense economics with a progressive policy challenge.
European defenseNATO spendingdefense procurementmilitary economicsindustrial fragmentation
TIER 5
Jun 20, 2025
Tooze argues the 2025 Iran-Israel war is geo-militarily unprecedented: two powers without a land border trading blows across 1,000 miles, with expensive air forces pitted against cheaper one-way ballistic missiles whose exo-atmospheric trajectories cross the Karman line and are intercepted in space by Arrow-3. He traces the lineage from the V1/V2 and captured Nazi rocketry through Soviet Scuds to today's solid-fueled precision missiles, and frames the contest as the opening of a new era of missile and anti-missile combat where the deciding economic question is who runs out of rockets first. A landmark synthesis of military history, defense economics, and the Reagan/SDI-to-Golden-Dome arc.
Iran-Israel warballistic missilesmissile defensemilitary historydefense economics
TIER 4
Mar 4, 2026
A numbered Chartbook essay tracing how the US-Israeli war on Iran propagates through the global fertilizer system: the Gulf handles ~one-third of inorganic-nutrient trade and Qatar's drone-disabled LNG, plus Iran's 10-12% share of urea, spikes urea prices and idles fertilizer plants in India and Pakistan at the spring planting peak. Tooze frames it as a textbook polycrisis linkage (Netanyahu-Trump-Iran-Qatar-LNG-fertilizer-Indian fiscal target) whose heaviest costs fall on poor African smallholder economies.
fertilizerIran warpolycrisisagricultureLNG
TIER 4
Mar 5, 2026
A numbered Chartbook essay arguing that Europe again faces a late-winter energy shock with gas storage at record lows (Germany 27%, Netherlands ~10% of capacity) just as the US-Israeli war shuts the Strait of Hormuz, echoing the February 2022 Russia shock and re-exposing self-imposed LNG dependence (including still-significant Russian gas). Tooze contends the durable answer is not Germany's proposed 20 GW of new gas capacity but a rapid solar-and-battery buildout enabled by China's electrotech scale-up.
Europe gasLNGenergy securityHormuzrenewables
TIER 4
Mar 15, 2026
Roundup carried by two genuine explainers: Simon Evans/Carbon Brief on why marginal pricing lets gas set the electricity price ~97% of the time in the UK, and Batmanghelidj/Phenomenal World estimating an Iranian-made Shahed-136 drone may cost only ~$4,000—an even more extreme cost-asymmetry versus multimillion-dollar interceptors than usually cited. Plus crude-type matching of supplier to buyer and African food-riot history.
electricity pricingenergy marketsdrone economicsIrancrude oil
TIER 4
Mar 26, 2026
A strong roundup leading with O'Hanlon's Brookings cost accounting of the Iran war (roughly $5.6bn in munitions in the first two days, ~$30-40bn by the one-month mark) set against historical conflicts to show the administration's $200bn request is a gross overestimate that risks blessing escalation. Pairs this with VW's talks to convert its Osnabruck plant to make Iron Dome components (the German auto-to-defense pivot), Matthijs's reading of Kindleberger on hegemonic leadership as a choice, and renewed M23 fighting in the DRC.
Iran war costsdefense spendingVW defense pivothegemony theoryDRC conflict
TIER 4
May 4, 2026
Strong energy-focused roundup showing US supermajors (Exxon, Chevron) refusing White House pressure to ramp Permian output during the Iran-war oil shock - prioritizing free cash flow over volume, with even maximal US growth a "garden hose in an Olympic pool" against the 10m+ b/d lost through a closed Strait of Hormuz. Also contrasts the staggering 2022 European energy-bailout response with the trivial measures now (governments mindful of the Liz Truss precedent and tighter bond constraints), plus Tanzania's revived LNG deal. Coherent, well-sourced energy-politics piece.
oil majorsStrait of Hormuzenergy crisisfiscal responseTanzania LNG
China - Growth, Statecraft & Development
4 tier-5 · 6 tier-4
Tooze treats China not as a 'case' or exception but as the master key to modernity and the central dynamic of world development. He builds a quality-into-quantity framework for reading the economy (393), argues its post-1978 surge is the single largest transformation in economic history across coal, Milanovic and Maddison metrics (450), and reads 'dual circulation' from the ground in summer 2025 (402). The statecraft strand covers BRI 2.0 and Beijing as a net recipient from poor debtors (462), shipbuilding subsidies (dollar-asset issue), the iron-ore pricing-power standoff with BHP (US-crude issue), and a prospective agricultural 'China shock' (445). The soft-power pieces anatomize 'Chinamaxxing' (446) and puncture the claim that China has none (lithography issue), while the carmaker essay reframes de-risking (309). For Tooze, every other theme ultimately runs through China.
TIER 4
Aug 14, 2024
Tooze argues that German carmakers' soaring China FDI is not a failure to heed 'de-risking' advice but a rational response to the fact that China is the market where the future of the global auto industry is being decided, as Chinese NEV brands overtake foreign joint ventures. The thesis: geopolitics cannot be treated as a mere parameter on business choices; in autos the industry dynamics themselves are the decisive geopolitical vector, making Taiwan tail-risk chatter superficial next to competitive collapse happening now. A strong, well-evidenced reframing of the de-risking debate.
China-autode-riskinggeoeconomicsEVsGerman-FDI
TIER 4
Nov 6, 2024
A Southeast Asia-heavy issue: the Netherlands taking ASML DUV export licensing back from US control (China = 25% of ASML revenue), Pew data undercutting the claim that China lacks soft power (favorable in 56% of middle-income economies), and two deep David Hutt analyses — the hollowing-out and near-collapse of the Lao state under a 125%-of-GDP debt load, and the security-apparatus consolidation of power within Vietnam's Politburo. The Laos state-capacity case study and the export-control detail give it durable reference value.
semiconductor export controlsASMLChina soft powerLaos state collapseVietnam politics
TIER 5
Jun 22, 2025
Tooze's flagship 'World Economy Now' essay argues China must be read through a quality-into-quantity dialectic that shuttles between macro metrics and world-historic development, then applies it to four fronts: real-estate-as-mass-urbanization, youth unemployment as generational scarring, the trade surplus as manufacturing supremacy, and deflation as a new accumulation regime (the BYD Seagull as 21st-century Model T). A landmark, framework-building synthesis with lasting reference value.
China economymacroeconomicsurbanizationdeflationdevelopment
TIER 5
Aug 5, 2025
A landmark reflective essay from Tooze's summer 2025 China trip arguing China must be understood not as a 'case' or 'exception' but as the central dynamic of world development — the master key to modernity — evidenced by the coal/energy data showing China's post-2000 industrial surge as a radical break with all prior human history. He extends this to urbanization (China's giant conurbations vs the anti-urban US) and proposes 'dual circulation' as the apt frame for a globalization whose most dynamic driver is now a vast, linguistically self-enclosed nation-state, forcing a rethink of inherited British- and US-centric models of the global.
Chinaglobalizationenergy transitionurbanizationmodernity
TIER 5
Sep 12, 2025
Tooze reads the Trump administration's 2025 denunciation of the SDGs and Paris Accords as marking the death of the depoliticized 'Wall Street consensus' universalism that peaked in 2015, fusing Slobodian's 'Hayek's Bastards' (the neoliberal right's turn against a 'green' Leviathan) with Moyn's 'Last Utopia' (human rights displacing development/sovereignty). His original move is to add China: Beijing now upholds the materialist SDG agenda the US has abandoned, exposing American hegemonic decline. A landmark synthesis with lasting reference value.
sustainable developmentneoliberalismUS hegemonyChinaintellectual history
TIER 4
Nov 16, 2025
A substantive numbered essay arguing that a third 'BRI 2.0 / Green Leap Outward' phase of Chinese overseas finance (surging green-manufacturing FDI and new commitments peaking in H1 2025) must be read against the unfinished prior phase, in which repayments turned China into a net recipient of payments from poor debtor countries. Tooze synthesizes Boston University, Griffith/Fudan, Lowy and MERICS data to frame BRI as both lock-in and a bargaining lever Beijing uses to trade economic concessions for geopolitical alignment. Matters as a structured map of competing readings of China's economic statecraft.
China BRIdevelopment financeGlobal South debtgreen FDIeconomic statecraft
TIER 4
Apr 5, 2026
Built around a long Bloomberg piece on China Mineral Resources Group's confrontation with BHP, a serious bid to wrest pricing power in the ~$190bn seaborne iron-ore market by banning Jimblebar ore and pushing miners onto Chinese price indices. The standoff, plus record US crude output and the Disney/von Braun and Chinese-internet cultural notes, makes this a more substantive issue than the typical roundup.
iron ore pricingChina BHP standoffUS oil productioncommodity powerChina internet
TIER 5
May 3, 2026
Tooze argues China's lurch into the world's largest agricultural trade deficit (self-sufficiency below 70%, driven by surging meat/soy-feed demand met overwhelmingly by Brazil) is a historically anomalous vulnerability, and asks whether Beijing will apply its industrial-policy toolkit to agriculture the way it did to new energy. Drawing on food-regime theory (Friedmann/McMichael), Polanyi's double movement, and a Systemiq report, he sketches a 15-20 year scenario in which Chinese imports from the US could fall 85%, upending the neoliberal corporate food regime. A landmark framing piece that ties food-security politics to the broader China-shock thesis.
Chinaagriculturefood securityglobal tradeindustrial policy
TIER 4
May 8, 2026
Drawing on a salon conversation with Dan Wang and Iza Ding, Tooze anatomizes "Chinamaxxing" - the current Western vogue for China - into seven vectors (technocratic envy, the shock of visiting, retro-authenticity, wellness, humor, cuteness, eros) and situates it against historical precedents (Maoism, kung-fu, East Asian developmentalism). The deeper question he poses is whether, in a polycentric world, anything like America's mid-century all-encompassing soft-power hegemony can recur. A thoughtful essay on soft power beyond hegemony.
China soft powerChinamaxxingcultural influencehegemonymultipolarity
TIER 4
May 28, 2026
A substantive numbered essay arguing China's post-1978 growth is the single largest transformation in economic history, demonstrated across three metrics: coal consumption (a three-phase energy history of humanity), Milanovic's population-weighted growth points (20x boom-Japan, ~290x Gilded-Age US), and absolute Maddison GDP (a $25.3tn increment, ~one quarter of all global GDP growth 1980-2020s). The methodological move of triangulating relative, absolute, and global-share measures gives it lasting reference value.
China growtheconomic historyGDP measurementMilanovicenergy history
Gaza, Genocide & the Middle East Economy
4 tier-5 · 4 tier-4
Tooze argues Gaza is categorically distinct from the world's other hunger zones: a deliberate famine imposed by a rich, Western-backed sovereign state rather than a 'crisis' of war or anarchy (400), prosecuted with the bulldozer as a tool of 'the liberal way of war' (405) and amounting to scholasticide and genocide by siege (349, 375, 412). He reads the Tel Aviv stock boom as a political revaluation of Israel's risk premium (396), anatomizes Hezbollah's shadow bank and Lebanon's disaster capitalism (312), and compiles the war's regional economic toll across the fractured 'Middle East economy' (321). The cluster is a sustained attempt to hold economic analysis and moral judgment together in the face of an ongoing atrocity.
TIER 5
Aug 26, 2024
A deep analytical essay on how Lebanon's catastrophic economic collapse since 2019 (currency down 98%, triple-digit inflation, GDP per capita down 45%, hard default on $32bn) entrenched Hezbollah's role as a parallel state, with its sanctioned shadow bank al-Qard al-Hasan providing gold-collateralized loans, generator networks, and dollar exchange channels woven into Christian business interests and cross-border criminal finance. Tooze argues this politics-everyday-life imbrication runs too deep to be 'extirpated through bombing.' A standout reference piece on disaster capitalism and shadow finance.
LebanonHezbollahshadow bankingsovereign defaultMiddle East economy
TIER 4
Sep 28, 2024
A substantive data-driven numbered essay arguing the 'Middle East economy' is a myth: the region splits between Asia-oriented Gulf energy exporters diversifying successfully and a set of conflict-mired or stagnating 'flyover' states with rising debt. It compiles Moody's downgrade of Israel amid soaring war costs, the collapse of the Gaza and West Bank economies, Red Sea/Suez trade disruption, OPEC+ output cuts, and persistent MENA capital flight. A useful reference compilation for the war's regional economic toll.
Middle East economyIsrael financesovereign debtRed Sea tradeGulf states
TIER 4
Jan 28, 2025
A substantive Chartbook essay developing "scholasticide" (Nabulsi's term) as a concept: cultural genocide via the targeted destruction of education, situating it in genocide theory (Lemkin) and place-based economics (universities as "anchor institutions"). Tooze contrasts the chaotic damage to Sudan's massively-expanded university system in the RSF war with the radically intense, US-backed Israeli destruction of all 12 Gaza universities, arguing Gaza's case is distinguished by the sheer concentration of firepower and the totality of erasure. Matters as a reference framing for analyzing cultural destruction in war.
scholasticide / cultural genocideGazaSudan civil warhigher educationgenocide theory
TIER 4
Apr 13, 2025
A long-form Chartbook reproducing a chapter from Avi Shlaim and Jamie Stern-Weiner's 'Genocide in Gaza,' tracing Israel's pre-2023 siege policy, the post-October-7 shift from 'mowing the lawn' to rendering Gaza uninhabitable, and the legal/factual case for genocide. As a densely sourced guest excerpt it is a substantial reference document, though the analytic frame is the authors', not Tooze's.
GazaIsraelgenocideMiddle Eastsettler colonialism
TIER 5
Jul 16, 2025
A full numbered essay arguing that the Tel Aviv stock boom since Oct 7 2023 (up 80% in dollar terms) is driven not by the Gaza assault but by Israel's demonstrated military superiority over Hezbollah and Iran, with the 'Grim Beeper' attack of Sept 2024 as the true inflection point. Tooze reads the market's belated repricing as a political revaluation: Netanyahu's coalition, once seen as a threat to the Israeli tech miracle, is now credited with lowering Israel's long-term risk premium. He stresses this synthesis of tech, violence and geopolitics is contingent and unstable, not a pre-given logic.
Israel economystock marketsIran warsettler-colonialismgeopolitics/risk premium
TIER 5
Jul 27, 2025
A landmark numbered essay arguing that Gaza's starvation is categorically distinct from the world's other hunger hot spots: every other zone of acute hunger is driven by civil war, anarchy, or chronic poverty, while Gaza's famine is the deliberate policy of a rich, sovereign state with Western backing. Tooze marshals FAO/WFP data to show Gaza is the only place where 100% of the population is at famine risk, framing it as genocide by siege rather than 'crisis.'
Gazafamine as weapongenocideIsrael policyAlex de Waal
TIER 5
Aug 22, 2025
A landmark essay using a Haaretz report on Israel's massive D9 bulldozer demolition campaign in Gaza to develop a genealogy of the bulldozer as a tool of "the liberal way of war." Tooze traces the machine from WWII airstrip construction and postwar US urban renewal to settler colonialism, and frames a four-part model (normative, historical/asymmetric, tactical, political-democratic) of how rich liberal democracies wage overwhelming asymmetric war while minimizing their own casualties. Original framework with lasting reference value linking Gaza to a wider Western history of mechanized violence.
GazaIsraelliberal way of warsettler colonialismmilitary history
TIER 4
Oct 8, 2025
The abstract/framing for Tooze's Sayigh Development Lecture in Ramallah, arguing that the comfortable vocabulary of 'post-war reconstruction and development' is unbearable applied to Gaza, since the destruction's announced aim is ethnic cleansing meeting the genocide standard rather than a war with a 'post-war.' It interrogates whether 'reconstruction' must first be defended against externally-imposed 'reconstitution' plans (the GREAT Trust) that erase a distinct Palestinian state, and whether there can be a macroeconomics of Palestine versus only the microeconomics of survival. A pointed meta-critique of development economics' inherited assumptions in the face of an ongoing atrocity.
Palestinegenocidereconstructiondevelopment economicsGaza
Tariffs, the Trade War & the Future of the World Economy
3 tier-5 · 7 tier-4
Here Tooze sizes and de-dramatizes the Trump trade shock. The 'World Economy Now' essays argue the US deficit is only ~1% of global GDP, so closing it is a minor adjustment rather than the end of globalization (383), and reimagine post-globalization order as a 'noodle and dumpling soup' beyond both the lego-brick national economy and the 1990s mesh (413). He locates Trumpian economics in policy space as 'Brexit-by-CBAM' (369), unpacks the incoherent legal scaffolding of tariff authority (434), tracks the real-time decoupling of the two largest economies (371) and its fallout for Vietnam and Southeast Asia (368), and weighs the renminbi-devaluation transmission chain (garbage-time issue). The stakes essay (337) frames the fork between coherent 'national Keynesianism' and dysfunctional protectionism. The cluster is a clinic in keeping proportion amid a trade-war spectacle.
TIER 4
Nov 13, 2024
Led by Robin Brooks' sharp argument that large Trump tariffs (e.g. 60%) could force an unprecedented, front-loaded renminbi devaluation to avoid 2015-style capital flight, dragging down Asian and EM currencies and commodities and making dollar pegs (Argentina, Egypt, Turkey) especially vulnerable. It also covers threats to Thai central-bank independence and China's 'garbage time of history' discourse, plus Perry Anderson's obituary of Fredric Jameson. The Brooks tariff-FX transmission chain is a genuinely useful analytical reference.
renminbi devaluationtariffsEM currenciescentral bank independenceChina sentiment
TIER 4
Dec 2, 2024
A substantive numbered Chartbook dissecting the likely path of Trump's second-term tariffs, building on Bloomberg's reporting (the 'Hassett algorithm,' sequenced Section 301/232/IEEPA escalation toward ~8% average tariffs and possible 75% on China). Tooze frames the deeper stakes as whether Trump pursues a coherent 'national Keynesian' strategy (per Pettis's case on global imbalances and the dollar) or a dysfunctional, regressive protectionism, and argues why he expects the latter. A useful analytical explainer of trade-policy mechanics and political economy.
Trump tariffstrade policyBessentPettisdollar hegemony
TIER 4
Apr 3, 2025
Tooze dissects the Southeast Asian fallout from Liberation Day, where Vietnam (46%), Cambodia (48%) and Laos (49%) topped the tariff list because Trump's absurd formula keys off trade-surplus-to-trade ratios, punishing poor export-led economies. He uses ADB value-added data to show most of Vietnam's China imports are not mere tariff-dodging transshipment, and dramatizes the scale via Nike's half-million Vietnamese workers. The episode signals a lasting collapse of US strategic standing in the region.
Trump tariffsVietnamSoutheast Asiasupply chainsUS strategy
TIER 5
Apr 8, 2025
Tooze locates Trump's tariffs in familiar policy space as 'Brexit-by-CBAM' - gratuitous self-harm dressed as sovereigntism crossed with a consumption tax meant to force structural shift - and predicts the sky won't fall but no rejuvenation comes; price signals alone can't summon reindustrializing investment. He attacks the 'investor power / buying time' model as a feature of uneven development, not a general law, and argues the US has more flex versus capital than assumed. A clarifying analytical framework with lasting interpretive value.
tariffsBrexitCBAMindustrial policybond vigilantes
TIER 4
Apr 10, 2025
Tooze reads the pivot to a 90-day tariff pause for the world plus 125% on China as a possible 'cunning plan': shake everyone, split the world into 'team comply' and 'team defy,' and isolate China into full decoupling. He stresses China's asymmetric 'precision-guided economic munitions' beyond tariffs and that the effective US tariff burden actually rose since China supplies disproportionately consumer goods. A sharp real-time read of how a $46tn decoupling got normalized.
US-China decouplingtariffstrade warsupply chainseconomic statecraft
TIER 4
Apr 27, 2025
A numbered Chartbook essay arguing that Canada's vulnerability to Trump is rooted in economic geography: Canada-US trade exceeds total intra-provincial trade, 90% of Canadians live within 150 miles of the border, and the provinces are integrated north-south with the US more than east-west with each other. Tooze uses population-density maps to show that, stripped of borders, "Canada" barely registers as a distinct entity on the North American map — explaining the existential anxiety in the sovereignty debate.
economic geographyCanadaUS-Canada tradeinternal trade barrierssovereignty
TIER 5
May 10, 2025
The inaugural 'World Economy Now' installment offers a framework for sizing the Trump trade shock: a five-region map of post-COVID growth, then the argument that the US trade deficit is only ~1% of global GDP and 3-4% of world trade, so closing it would be a minor adjustment, not the end of globalization. Tooze contrasts the distorting 'net imbalances' optic with the multipolar gross-trade network and locates the real risk in US domestic demand and a possible US recession. A landmark orientation piece with lasting reference value.
world economytrade deficitTrump tariffsglobalizationUS recession
TIER 4
Aug 8, 2025
A substantive numbered essay arguing Trump's trade worldview is best read not as strategy or geopolitics but as a fairytale: a Gulliver-vs-Lilliput fantasy in which a sleeping American giant rouses to make scheming small nations pay up. Tooze suggests the EU's humiliating-looking concessions ($600bn investment, $750bn energy purchases) may be cunning performance — playing along with a deluded giant who is, in fact, wearing no clothes — and that the only viable tactic is to indulge his 'sweet spots' one day at a time.
Trumptrade policytariffsEU-USpolitical analysis
TIER 5
Oct 12, 2025
A landmark conceptual essay (from Columbia remarks marking the 1945 anniversary) on how to imagine the world economy beyond three exhausted models: the 'lego brick' assemblage of hard national economies (Bretton Woods), the privatized 'mesh of interlocking balance sheets' (Hyun Song Shin, in crisis since 2008), and hyperglobalism. Tooze argues neither restored national economies nor 1990s-style networks fit, proposing instead 'globality beyond globalization' imagined as a precarious 'noodle and dumpling soup' of footloose money, mobile labor, networks, and occasional solid nuggets. Original framework with lasting reference value for thinking about uneven, combined, post-globalization order.
world economyglobalizationdeglobalizationnational economyeconomic theory
TIER 4
Feb 23, 2026
After losing in the Supreme Court, Trump invokes Section 122 ("balance-of-payments authority") of the 1974 Trade Act to impose new tariffs, and Tooze unpacks why the legal text is incoherent for a modern fiat economy. He argues a "balance of payments deficit" only made sense under Bretton Woods gold-dollar convertibility (when reserve depletion was real); today the US faces no payments "problem" since it prints the reserve currency, so the only defensible litigation route is the law's vaguer "disequilibrium" language. It matters as a sharp econ-history-meets-law dissection of how 1970s emergency statutes are recycled into present-day tariff politics.
balance of paymentsTrump tariffsBretton WoodsSection 122 / Trade Act 1974dollar hegemony
AI, Tech Capital, Industrial Policy & the Future of Work
2 tier-5 · 7 tier-4
Tooze's running argument about the AI moment is that big tech's embrace of Trump is a 'malign coincidence' of timelines - the hyperscalers' trillion-dollar build-out and MAGA's institutional demolition both run on an 'if not now, never' clock (410). He follows the financial plumbing of the boom (GPU-collateralized 'neocloud' loans, the AI doom-loop of OpEx substitution, the cognitive dissonance of record equities beside an oil shock) and the macro outlook of 2026 stagflation (47-bubble, lending-against-chips issue, AI-doom issue, oil-profits issue), while puncturing AI-doom narratives with deep labor-market history showing today's churn is mild by historical standards (labor-churn issue, new-work issue). The industrial-policy strand - Intel as the fragile linchpin of CHIPS-Act semiconductor strategy (306) and the deindustrialization-to-care-economy shift (medico-industrial issue), plus Red AI on LLMs and political language (385) - ties technology to the political economy of US capital. The cluster matters as Tooze's account of where accumulation now comes from.
TIER 5
Aug 7, 2024
An incisive case study of why Intel is the fragile linchpin of US/German chip industrial policy: a decades-long competitive loser (missed mobile, fab missteps, missed AI) that nonetheless attracts $20bn+ in CHIPS-act and German subsidies and is now 'blending' that public money with private-equity financial engineering (Apollo, Brookfield's Semiconductor Co-Investment Program) to fund $100bn in fabs. Tooze uses Intel to expose the structural mismatch between glacial state subsidy and the capital intensity and commodity-cycle speed of semiconductors. A landmark synthesis of the political economy of chip industrial policy with lasting reference value.
Intelindustrial-policysemiconductorsprivate-equityBidenomics
TIER 4
Nov 12, 2024
The lead item is a clear explainer on the emerging market for loans collateralized by Nvidia GPUs to 'neocloud' firms (CoreWeave, Crusoe, Lambda) — circular financing where chip-backed loans buy more chips, inflating Nvidia's earnings and concentrating AI-boom risk. It pairs this with India's mass 'participatory capitalism' (1 in 5 households now hold shares) and Cuba's collapsing oil imports. The GPU-collateral mechanics make this a useful primer on the financial plumbing of the AI bubble.
GPU collateralneocloudsAI financeIndia retail investingCuba
TIER 4
Dec 29, 2024
A reflective essay, written from Tooze's hospital recovery after open-heart surgery, synthesizing Gabriel Winant's The Next Shift on how Pittsburgh's deindustrialization transformed local working-class hospitals into a corporatized, university-linked health-care economy that displaced steel as the region's largest employer. Tooze partly contests Winant's downbeat 'crisis of care' framing with his own experience of high-tech, unionized care, and links it to LaToya Ruby Frazier's photography of Braddock. A substantive engagement with labor history and the political economy of US health care.
health care economydeindustrializationGabriel Winantlabor historycare work
TIER 4
Jan 27, 2025
A Top Links issue anchored by a long Deming/Ong/Summers excerpt placing today's labor-market churn in historical perspective: the 1880-1900 agrarian-to-industrial shift and the 1940-70 era were far more disruptive than the digital age, with the 1990s-2010s among the calmest periods, complicating AI-doom narratives. It also covers stalled service-job growth and Ballim's "writhing leviathans" study of apartheid-era Eskom/Iscor as more than mere instruments of state capacity. Substantive on labor-market history.
labor market historyautomation / AI fearsservice jobsstate-owned enterprises / EskomSouth Africa
TIER 4
Jan 28, 2025
A Top Links issue built around an extensive excerpt of the Autor et al. QJE paper on "new work," which documents that most current US employment is in job specialties created after 1940, with new-work creation shifting from middle-paid production/clerical (1940-80) to high-paid professional and low-paid services since 1980, and shows augmentation innovations create new work while automation ones erode demand. The depth of the labor-economics excerpt gives it lasting reference value beyond the usual roundup, with photocopier-art and Caribbean oil-history notes attached.
labor economics / new workautomation vs augmentationtechnological changeAutor / QJEeconomic history
TIER 4
May 16, 2025
Tooze recounts using ChatGPT to learn Mandarin via Mao's Little Red Book, watching it decode the formulaic structure of Maoist rhetoric and then generate templates, slogans, a manifesto and posters for revolution in China and the USA, before DeepSeek refuses the same prompt and translates its own censorship into eloquent English. A vivid demonstration of LLMs' facility with formulaic political language and of differing model guardrails; engaging and illustrative rather than a structural argument.
AI/LLMsChatGPTDeepSeekcensorshippolitical language
TIER 5
Sep 23, 2025
A landmark numbered essay arguing that big tech's embrace of Trump is best explained not by ideology or greed but by a 'malign coincidence' of timelines: the hyperscalers' trillion-dollar AI build-out and MAGA's institutional demolition both run on a 'if not now, never' clock that empties out the medium-term, making them an alliance of convenience that decides everything by 2028. Tooze distinguishes the corporate hyperscalers from smaller players (Palantir, a16z), shows how AI distracts the C-suite from Trump's uglier policies, and sketches a 2x2 scenario matrix for what comes next. An original framework with lasting reference value for thinking about AI capital and US political economy.
hyperscalingMAGAbig techAI investmentpolitical economy
TIER 4
Mar 16, 2026
Stronger-than-usual roundup whose core is Andy Haldane's FT argument that 2026 differs from 2025 because the energy shock removes central banks' room to ease and threatens the energy-hungry AI 'tech train,' yielding amplifying stagflationary forces rather than 2025's neutralizing tariff-vs-tech waves. Adds a ~$60bn US oil-producer windfall (with BP/Exxon more Mideast-exposed than Chevron), coal's shift to a flexibility reserve in China, the Chinese-media 'kill line' meme, and Habermas obituaries.
oil profitsmacro outlookstagflationAI energyHabermas
TIER 4
Mar 31, 2026
Anchored by Citrini Research's provocative "AI doom loop" scenario, in which AI as OpEx substitution (not hyperscaler CapEx) drives a self-reinforcing layoff-deflation feedback loop that keeps the AI buildout going even as demand collapses, hitting service-export economies like India hardest (rupee down 18%, IMF talks by 2028). Rounded out by AIPAC's pivot to unlimited-spend super-PAC electoral targeting via anodyne proxy groups, plus China's yacht market and Mexico's informal labor market. The AI-macro thesis gives it real analytical weight.
AI labor displacementAI doom loopIndia servicesAIPACChinese yachts
Europe & Germany - Decline, the Debt Brake & the Far Right
1 tier-5 · 13 tier-4
Tooze's Europe writing pairs a diagnosis of malaise with a fiscal-political prescription. The Draghi-report essays (317, 318) and the 'European decline' interrogation (420) weigh the real productivity gap against the superstar-tech explanation; 'polygloom' frames German stagnation as largely home-grown, a debt-brake-driven demand recession (463). The debt-brake fight is tracked through its parliamentary mechanics and progressive dilemmas (357, 358), and the AfD's rise is read across the eastern state elections and the 2025 federal vote (314, 320, 355, 356). Macron's twilight (411), Vance's Munich provocation (353) and the new-type euro-crisis financing of defence (data-centers issue) round it out. The cluster is Tooze's case that Europe's problems are largely self-imposed and fiscally fixable.
TIER 4
Jul 17, 2024
Tooze reads the 2024 UK election through the lens of "deconvergence" — Britain's distinctive economic malaise (bottom-of-G7 productivity, chronic underinvestment, stagnant real earnings, collapsed trust in government) and an inward-turned, restorationist politics that diverges sharply from Macron's France or Scholz's Germany. He argues Starmer's broad anti-Tory coalition won a huge majority on a small vote share, but its patriotic, NHS/cost-of-living/immigration-focused frame and refusal to reopen Brexit or respond to the Gaza-driven Muslim vote reinforce, rather than overturn, the narrow nationalist parameters set by the 2016 referendum. It matters as a comparative-political-economy framework linking economic decline to a "blocked" national political idiom.
UK politicsStarmer/Labourdeconvergencepolitical economyBrexit
TIER 4
Sep 1, 2024
A data-rich anatomy of the AfD's commanding wins in the Thuringia and Saxony state elections, showing the party's electorate skews young, male, less-educated, self-identified 'workers' who feel financially precarious yet reject more welfare and trust almost no public institution. Tooze argues the AfD is a culture-warrior bloc defined by anti-migration, anti-crime and anti-Green sentiment, not a mass party, and that East-West divergence plus a feeling of 'second-class citizenship' is reshaping the whole German political map rightward. It matters as a granular sociological reading of how far-right normalization is taking hold in the former East.
GermanyAfDfar-right politicsEast Germanyelectoral sociology
TIER 4
Sep 10, 2024
First installment on the Draghi report, focusing on the widening EU-US GDP and productivity gap, with ~70% of the per-capita gap attributable to lower European productivity. Tooze walks through the investment shortfall, the 4:1 US-EU venture-capital ratio, the US dominance in unicorns, and Draghi's radical call for EUR 750-800bn in annual investment (4.4-4.7% of GDP, dwarfing the Marshall Plan). A clear, chart-driven explainer of the report's core diagnosis and its politically explosive investment ask.
Draghi reportEU-US productivity gapventure capitalinvestmentEuropean decline
TIER 4
Sep 12, 2024
The second installment on the Draghi competitiveness report, shifting from macro aggregates to a sector-by-sector diagnosis of why European business demand for investment is weak: autos eroded by Chinese EVs, marginal positions in tech/cloud/AI, fragmentation in telecom, lagging pharma R&D, and underinvestment in defense and space. Tooze argues Europe's problem is dysfunctional state-capital relations and that the answer is bigger markets, more investment, and demand-led growth, not deflation. A useful, data-rich explainer though heavily reliant on report excerpts.
Draghi reportEuropean competitivenessindustrial policyEV/Chinatech investment gap
TIER 4
Sep 23, 2024
A substantive numbered analysis of the 2024 Brandenburg state election, where the SPD narrowly held off the far-right AfD by mobilizing Green and Die Linke voters around premier Woidke. Tooze dissects the vote flows, the AfD's outsized appeal to new, young and working-class voters, the rise of the Wagenknecht movement at Die Linke's expense, and the CDU's failure to contain the right, arguing the AfD is now the most dynamic force in German politics.
German politicsAfDBrandenburg electionfar rightvoter behavior
TIER 4
Feb 16, 2025
A substantive numbered Chartbook essay arguing that J.D. Vance's Munich Security Conference speech was a deliberate debater's provocation that exposed Europe's strategic dependence and the attenuation of its political class. Tooze contends the real lesson is that Europe must finally provide for its own security rather than be cowed by MAGA's incoherent culture-war 'bull****'; it matters as a sharp framing of the trans-Atlantic rupture under Trump 2.0.
transatlantic relationsVanceEuropean securityMAGAGermany
TIER 4
Feb 23, 2025
A numbered Chartbook election-night essay: the result was a devastating defeat for the Scholz coalition (SPD's worst-ever FRG showing, FDP likely out) but only a weak CDU win under 30%, with Die Linke's comeback the real left-wing surprise. Tooze argues that fragmentation plus ~84% turnout is not a democratic crisis, that migration dominated but was one issue among many, and that inflation had faded as "team transitory" was vindicated, leaving structural questions about the German social contract.
German election 2025Scholz coalitionCDU / Merzmigration politicsinflation / transitory
TIER 4
Feb 24, 2025
A numbered Chartbook essay reading the 2025 German election results: the surge in turnout (and 1.8m former non-voters going to the AfD) shows democracy is alive, but Germany's sophisticated multi-party system prevents the resentful minority from dominating government as MAGA does in the US. Tooze maps the AfD's regional dominance in the East, its capture of the "worker" vote, and the sharp age and gender cleavages, with young women migrating left (driven by Die Linke) by a 30-point margin.
German election 2025AfDdemocracyclass realignmentgender polarization
TIER 4
Mar 6, 2025
A numbered essay dissecting the parliamentary mechanics of the CDU-SPD plan to lift the debt brake in the lame-duck Bundestag before the newly elected one convenes, framing it as an audacious gamble that requires the Greens to behave as loyal members of a coalition they are not part of. Tooze details the vote arithmetic, the defense-only carve-out designed to exclude Die Linke, and the democratic-legitimacy problem of pre-empting the February 23 election result. A clear, useful primer on why the celebrated deal was far from settled.
debt brakeGerman politicsBundestagMerzfiscal policy
TIER 4
Mar 8, 2025
A numbered essay (republished from Surplus magazine) arguing that ending Germany's debt brake is a historical necessity but that the CDU-SPD package is lop-sided and partisan, privileging defense and infrastructure while downgrading the climate transition and social policy. Tooze lays out three challenges progressives must confront: managing the price/structural-change effects of running the economy hot, contesting the spending priorities, and resisting the package's democratic-legitimacy deficit. A substantive intervention in German fiscal-policy debate.
debt brakeGerman fiscal policypublic investmentGreensprogressive economics
TIER 4
Oct 4, 2025
A substantive numbered essay reading Pisani-Ferry's Legion d'honneur acceptance speech as a generational reckoning of the European center-left: an admission of defeat across the three causes (open trade, European integration, the green transition) that defined his career, capped by shame at von der Leyen's capitulation to Trump. Tooze layers in Sperber/NLR's reading of Macron as something stranger than a neoliberal technocrat. A reflective intellectual-history piece on the exhaustion of social-democratic globalism.
FranceMacronEuropean center-leftglobalizationclimate politics
TIER 5
Dec 4, 2025
A landmark numbered Chartbook essay coining 'polygloom' to describe Germany's compounding, non-summable malaise and arguing the stagnation is largely home-grown: a domestic-demand recession driven by the post-2009 debt brake and 'black zero' fiscal orthodoxy inherited from the SPD, layered atop the China shock, geopolitical insecurity, and the AfD's rise among a quarter of the population now of migrant heritage. Tooze's prescription is large-scale public investment coupling defense and infrastructure to human-capital and integration needs, with strong analytic framing of why German industrial decline is a genuine puzzle. High reference value as a synthesis of Germany's political economy.
Germany economydebt brakeAfDfiscal policydeindustrialization
TIER 4
Dec 21, 2025
Numbered essay interrogating the Draghi-report 'European decline' meme, weighing Zucman/Piketty's ILO-based claim that EU labour productivity per hour exceeds the US against OECD/AMECO data showing a real but stable 15-year gap, and arguing the divergence is driven by US superstar tech firms rather than the broad US economy. Reframes the comparison as California's tech upleg versus 'Europe and the rest of the US' on the more agreeable downleg of a K-shaped OECD. A substantive, data-careful intervention.
European declineproductivity gapDraghi reportK-shaped OECDsuperstar firms
TIER 4
Mar 14, 2026
Roundup with three substantive items: an Economist piece arguing US retail electricity-rate rises predate the AI boom and stem mainly from grid upgrades, equipment/copper costs and climate hardening rather than data centers; an FT report on Poland's president Nawrocki vetoing €44bn of EU SAFE defence loans as a sovereignty-threatening FX loan; and falling US Tomahawk procurement amid Mideast missile depletion. Closes with a comic Confucius Institute dialogue.
electricity pricesdata centersEU defence financingPolandmissiles
Global Development, Poverty & the Global South
1 tier-5 · 10 tier-4
Tooze's development writing insists the rich world does not know 'what time it is': in 2023, OECD-classified aid to Ukraine exceeded all official development assistance to Africa (313), exposing an enduring 'global colour line.' The social-reproduction series reads maternal mortality worldwide and the American shame of it as triumph-and-tragedy (334, 335); the poverty pieces show extreme poverty stalling and concentrating in fragile, conflict-affected sub-Saharan states (330, 404). Regional studies span Central America and the Caribbean (307), Haiti's collapse (Haiti issue), Bangladesh's neglected 1971 history (315) and Venezuela's contested oil (423, 424). The cluster keeps the world's poorest in frame while the commentariat watches the trade-war spectacle.
TIER 4
Aug 9, 2024
Tooze argues that the US political class, across both parties, has settled into resigned indifference toward the polycrisis on its doorstep in Central America and the Caribbean, treating root-cause development as 'mission impossible' rather than a policy challenge. Marshalling data on Latin American inequality, dollarization's costs, the Cuba/Haiti/Venezuela crises, US assistance levels, and tripling remittances to Mexico, he calls for a pooled regional approach (US, Mexico, Colombia, richer Caribbean states) instead of militarized border control. A substantive regional political-economy essay.
polycrisismigrationCentral-AmericaMexicoremittances
TIER 5
Aug 31, 2024
Tooze frames the 'polycrisis' as the condition of acting 'in medias res' and asks whether the rich world grasps 'what time it is' on global development, then delivers a damning quantitative indictment: in 2023, OECD-classified aid to Ukraine exceeded all official development assistance to the entire African continent, while Sudan's famine appeal went underfunded. The essay argues this discrepancy lays bare an enduring 'global colour line' in which crises affecting 'people like us' get resourced and African catastrophes get abstract sympathy. A landmark, reference-grade argument tying development economics to racial hierarchy and Western self-understanding.
polycrisisdevelopment aidAfricaUkraineglobal inequality
TIER 4
Sep 4, 2024
Prompted by the muted Western reaction to Bangladesh's August 2024 student revolution, Tooze reflects on the West's diminished capacity to engage with the global present, then offers a seven-point primer on Bangladesh's 1971 founding: the demographic oddity of a larger seceding region, Ayub Khan's growth model and its disparities, the consequential 1968 student movement, the genocide and refugee exodus, Kissinger's crude Cold War calculus, the global pop-culture mobilization, and the 1974 famine that shaped the country's pro-poor development model. A rich historical essay blending reflection and reference.
Bangladesh1971 independencedevelopment historyCold Warfamine
TIER 4
Oct 27, 2024
A substantive numbered Chartbook essay arguing that after the 1990-2015 collapse in global extreme poverty (driven by China and India), progress has stalled for a 'lost decade' and absolute poverty is now concentrated in a belt across Sub-Saharan Africa and fragile/conflict states, where 75% of the extreme poor now live. Tooze stresses that future poverty reduction depends above all on political stability and macro-fiscal sustainability, a sobering reframing as conflict and debt distress rise.
global povertySub-Saharan AfricaWorld Bankpolycrisisdevelopment economics
TIER 4
Nov 23, 2024
The opening installment of Tooze's social-reproduction series reads global maternal-mortality data as both triumph and tragedy: worldwide deaths fell from 446,000 (2000) to 287,000 (2020), but three-quarters of that gain came from South Asia while Sub-Saharan Africa, with 70% of the global total, barely improved as its young female population surged. He highlights Nigeria (28% of world maternal deaths, just 12.6% improvement) against standout performers Rwanda, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Mozambique, Angola and Sierra Leone, arguing peace is the precondition for human-development progress. A clear, well-quantified development-economics essay.
maternal mortalitySub-Saharan Africaglobal developmentNigeriaChartbook essay
TIER 4
Nov 24, 2024
Part two of Tooze's social-reproduction series interrogates the US's anomalously high and apparently doubling maternal mortality, weighing the revisionist claim that the rise is a reporting artifact (CDC rates possibly double the true ~10/100k) against CDC rebuttals. He concludes that whatever the level, three things are undisputed: the US is worse than every comparable rich country, it is failing to improve while others do, and the racial disparities (Black women dying at 40-50x Swiss rates) are a damning indictment. A substantive, data-driven essay on a neglected health-system failure.
maternal mortalityUS healthcaresocial reproductionracial inequalityChartbook essay
TIER 4
Mar 1, 2025
Tooze argues the US globalization discourse is wildly overdone: imports ex-oil have not budged from ~14% of GDP since 2009 and exports have drifted down, so America is and always was a relatively closed economy. The issue's centerpiece is a long Fatton excerpt on Haiti's polycrisis, tracing the gangsterization of society, the predatory ruling class, failed foreign interventions, and the rise of Bwa Kale self-defense movements. Closes with Bei Dao's poem (Sidetracks IX).
US globalizationtrade opennessHaiti / state collapseforeign interventionpolycrisis
TIER 4
Apr 18, 2025
A numbered Chartbook essay dissecting the US mission's March 4 "folk Schmittian" denunciation of the UN's 2030 Agenda and Sustainable Development Goals as soft global governance and a vehicle for Xi Jinping thought — and the near-total absence of any reaction to it. Tooze's argument: the unnoticed ~$40bn collapse in Western aid budgets matters far more for the world's most vulnerable than the trade-war spectacle that consumes attention, exposing how hollow the 2015 globalist agenda always was.
UN SDGsforeign aidglobal developmentCarl SchmittUS foreign policy
TIER 4
Aug 20, 2025
A substantive essay drawing on a new World Bank report to argue that extreme poverty is being redefined: as middle-income countries lift billions out of $3/day poverty, dire poverty is increasingly concentrated in fragile and conflict-affected states (FCS), overwhelmingly in sub-Saharan Africa, where one-third remain in absolute poverty. Tooze ties Gaza, Tigray, Sudan and the DRC into his "polycrisis" frame of violence-driven de-development and warns that Western aid and peacekeeping are a drop in the ocean. A clear, data-grounded synthesis on the geography of poverty and conflict.
development economicspovertyfragile statessub-Saharan Africapolycrisis
TIER 4
Jan 5, 2026
A carefully sourced deep-dive on Venezuela's oil history and the contested Exxon/ConocoPhillips compensation claims, dissecting why 'world's largest reserves' overstates value (extra-heavy Orinoco crude, economic vs technical recoverability) and how the 1990s Apertura, Chavez's 2000s renegotiation, and Trump-era sanctions shaped the collapse. Tooze deliberately offers pointers over big claims, but the assembled evidence (including WikiLeaks cables undermining the oil majors' arbitration case) gives it lasting reference value for the Venezuela-oil debate.
Venezuelaoil reservesExxon/ConocoPhillipsICSID arbitrationOrinoco Belt
TIER 4
Jan 7, 2026
An analytical reading-list essay on the geoeconomics of the US intervention in Venezuela, weighing Javier Blas's 'Donroe Doctrine' thesis that Trump now commands an oil empire (~40% of world output across the Americas) against skeptics: Venezuela is a minor share of China's imports, the heavy-crude reserves need ~$110bn capex and years to revive, and supply is heading into glut. Tooze curates and adjudicates competing expert takes, making it a useful guide to the debate even if not a fully original framework.
Venezuelaoil geopoliticsDonroe doctrineTrumpenergy markets