Brown, a Labour Party leader who was doing his delicate best not to antagonize the trillion-dollar interests of the City of London, might have lost touch with the “humdrum reality” of a Britain gripped by recession, but as Tooze wryly puts it, the prime minister “proved that he was perfectly suited to the role of Treasury secretary to the world.”

Yes, the compliment is as backhanded as it sounds, but it’s a measure of Tooze’s nuanced and often counterintuitive narrative that the line retains a measure of praise, however faint. Part of Tooze’s argument in “Crashed” is that the technical know-how of an able treasury secretary can be useful in a crisis. He depicts Timothy Geithner, the treasury secretary during President Barack Obama’s first, hairy term in office, as a technocrat ne plus ultra, a public servant committed to upholding the financial system, which he ultimately did do.

What Geithner didn’t do was nationalize or break up the “too big to fail” banks, or pay much heed to struggling homeowners whose mortgages were underwater. Instead, he invested the regulatory bureaucracy he knew so well with greater powers of oversight. It was a solution fit for a manager — and for someone who in Tooze’s estimation revered the system as much as Geithner did.

This approach apparently satisfied Obama, whose administration is described as an embodiment of “American corporate liberalism.” Again, the characterization is doubled-edged. Obama was “by inclination a bipartisan centrist” forced to fend off “the sheer violence of the conservative hostility toward him.” He shepherded the banks through calamity with a firm but gentle hand. They got their bailout, so that even the gargantuan Citigroup, whose sheer survival was entirely dependent on government action, was able to splurge for $5 billion in bonuses a year later.

Any non-bankers who lost their jobs or homes weren’t so lucky. On the apparent Democratic distaste for conflict, Tooze is quietly scathing. “Rather than seeking to mobilize the indignation simmering in American society,” the Obama administration sought to tamp it down, offering “one technocratic fix after another.” Putting it another way, Democratic centrism won the (financial) war but lost the (political) peace. To judge from Trump’s ascendancy, along with the historical evidence so scrupulously marshaled in “Crash,” Tooze is right.

But at least Obama took seriously his responsibility to govern, whereas the same can’t be said for Republicans, portrayed here as gifted obstructionists “incapable of legislating or cooperating effectively.” “Crashed” details how Republican administrations had abandoned fiscal responsibility long ago, bloating the deficit with pumped-up military spending and protracted, expensive wars, while leaving it to their Democratic successors to clean up the mess.

One of the great virtues of this bravura work of economic history is how much attention it devotes to issues of power. “Who was being hurt?” Tooze writes of the 2008 crisis. “Who was included in the circle of those who needed to be protected? And who was not?” He reckons that in their bid to paper over such fundamental political questions with technical solutions, neoliberal centrists inadvertently answered them. Incremental tweaking did little to address the grief and suffering caused by the crisis, making political power more visible. By laying bare who would be sacrificed when the tide went out, they left a ragged hole for the likes of Trump and Bannon to walk through.