Beyond the crash | Adam Tooze

Politics don't matter; market forces shape our world. So ran the dominant ethos before 2008. Adam Tooze, the author of a landmark book, says it was always an illusion

'I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer." That was Tony Blair, Britain's prime minister, in October 2005.

Two years later, in the autumn of 2007, Alan Greenspan, the former chair of the US Federal Reserve, was asked by a Swiss newspaper which candidate he was supporting in the forthcoming US presidential election. His response was striking. How he voted did not matter, Greenspan declared, because "[we] are fortunate that, thanks to globalisation, policy decisions in the US have been largely replaced by global market forces. National security aside, it hardly makes any difference who will be the next president. The world is governed by market forces."