Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy Free Audiobook Download by Adam Tooze

The 1990s saw a broadening of the world's financial markets and the beginning of globalization. In 1996, a new hedge fund began to emerge in New York called Covid. The company wasn't expected to last long but its management was determined to dominate the rapidly growing market for futures trading. From there on, their fortunes rose like an unstoppable rocket ship, until they ran out of fuel when the U.S. government shut down their operations in 1998.

The U.S. government shutdown of October 2013 lasted 16 days and caused a total loss of $24 billion to the economy. The shutdown was initiated by conservative Republicans who were outraged about President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act and Obamacare, which they portrayed as "government takeover."

Covid Credit Union was a company that had been with the community for decades. It is based in Covina, California, and has approximately $12 billion in assets, making it the largest credit union in the United States. It was also part of a centralized system that made it able to borrow money from other institutions at low rates. What happened on March 23rd could've been a blip on the radar for most companies, but not for Covid Credit Union. They woke up to red numbers and were unable to repay what they owed in loans from other banks which would've placed them into bankruptcy if they did not reverse course quickly.

Adam Tooze is an economic historian and journalist. He wrote a book about the financial crisis called 'The Deluge: The Great Financial Crisis and How It Changed a Nation, a Continent and the World'. The book was based on the idea that one of the precipitating factors in the global financial crisis was the collapse of Covid, a satellite company owned by Goldman Sachs. Covid could not access funding because it did not have collateral to pay off its debt, despite having been profitable until then. This ultimately led to its shutdown on November 18th 2008, known as 'Black Thursday'.

One of the most important and fascinating books to emerge from the United States in recent years, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze is a detailed account of how the combination of technological innovation and sheer human will created an international financial system known as "Covid" which has reduced our reliance on outdated and expensive monetary tools, such as gold.