6 ideas
Thompson links rising oil prices in 2004–06 to inflation pressure and Federal Reserve tightening, which squeezed overleveraged borrowers ahead of the crash. She also records the Fed cutting rates from September 2007, so oil did not dictate policy on its own. On her account, energy was one strand in how the financial crisis built up through credit markets.
Offshore dollar markets, mainly in London from the 1950s and 60s, let banks create dollar credit outside Federal Reserve regulation. The rest of the world then came to depend on dollar liquidity it could not supply itself. This left the Fed as de facto lender of last resort to foreign banks, as the 2008 swap lines showed.
Cheap credit after 2008 financed the American shale boom and turned the US back into a top oil producer. That weakened US interest in Middle East security and shifted its relations with Saudi Arabia and Russia. Loose money therefore changed the energy map, and the new energy map changed foreign policy.
Thompson treats pipeline infrastructure and gas dependence as real constraints on European states' geopolitical choices toward Russia. Germany's Nord Stream decisions divided NATO allies and exposed tension between Europe's security commitments and its energy needs. Gas transit routes are one strand in her account of the Ukraine crisis, alongside its other dimensions.
After 2008, quantitative easing inflated asset prices, which enriched existing owners and left wage earners behind. These distributional choices were made by unelected technocrats beyond electoral reach. Voters experienced democracy as unable to govern the economy, which fed anti-system politics.
Disorder is analysed across three connected arenas: geopolitics driven by energy, the world economy driven by dollar finance, and domestic democratic politics. A shock in one arena propagates to the others, so no crisis can be understood within a single domain. The Brexit vote and Trump's election are treated as democratic expressions of long-running energy and monetary strains, not isolated events.