Lords of Finance: 1929, The Great Depression - and the Bankers Who Broke the World [Hardcover]

`Highly readable ... [Ahamed] cannot have foreseen how timely his book would be.' --Niall Ferguson, FT

'Superlative ... a subject of real fascination ... Lords of Finance has the flair and wisdom to find a wide readership on the strength of its main ideas.' --New York Times

`Fascinating ... a brisk, original, incisive and entertaining account of a crucial time in the world's economic history that continues to affect us all today. Anyone who wants to understand the origins of the economic world we live in would do well to read this book'

`A great read.'

`One of those rare books - authoritative, readable and relevant - that puts the "story" back into history ... a spellbinding, richly human [and] cinematic narrative.'

'Absorbing [and] provocative, not least because it is still relevant.'

`has immense importance to modern policymaking ... a fascinating and even a great book'

`Magisterial'

`Brilliantly readable'

`A major work of scholarship'

`Absorbing [and] provocative'

Many of us take it as a given that the Great Depression - the consequences of which reverberated for decades, crippling the future of an entire generation and setting the stage for WWII - resulted from a confluence of inexorable forces beyond any one person or government's control. In fact, as erudite economist Liaquat Ahamed explains, it was the decisions taken by a small number of central bankers that were the primary cause of the economic meltdown. "In Lords of Finance", we meet the neurotic and enigmatic Montagu Norman of the Bank of England; the xenophobic and suspicious Emile Moreau of the Banque de France; the arrogant yet brilliant Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank; and the dynamic Benjamin Strong of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. These four men were as prominent in their time as Alan Greenspan, Hank Paulson and Mervyn King are today, but their names were lost to history, their story untold, until now.Harnessing a keen sense of history and the narrative skills of the novelist, Liaquat Ahamed tells their story in vivid and gripping detail. As yet another period of economic turmoil makes headlines today, the Great Depression and the year 1929 remain the benchmark for true financial mayhem. Offering a new understanding of the origins and global nature of financial crises, "Lords of Finance" a timely and arresting reminder that individuals - their ambitions, limitations and human nature - lie at the very heart of global catastrophe.

It is commonly believed that the Great Depression that began in 1929 resulted from a confluence of events beyond any one person’s or government’s control. In fact, as Liaquat Ahamed reveals, it was the decisions taken by a small number of central bankers that were the primary cause of the economic meltdown, the effects of which set the stage for World War II and reverberated for decades.

In Lords of Finance, we meet the neurotic and enigmatic Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, the xenophobic and suspicious Émile Moreau of the Banque de France, the arrogant yet brilliant Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank, and Benjamin Strong of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, whose façade of energy and drive masked a deeply wounded and overburdened man. After the First World War, these central bankers attempted to reconstruct the world of international finance. Despite their differences, they were united by a common fear - that the greatest threat to capitalism was inflation - and by a common vision that the solution was to turn back the clock and return the world to the gold standard.

For a brief period in the mid-1920s they appeared to have succeeded. The world’s currencies were stabilized and capital began flowing freely across the globe. But beneath the veneer of boom-town prosperity, cracks started to appear in the financial system. The gold standard that all had believed would provide an umbrella of stability proved to be a straitjacket, and the world economy began that terrible downward spiral known as the Great Depression.

As yet another period of economic turmoil makes headlines today, the Great Depression and the year 1929 remain the benchmark for true financial mayhem. Offering a new understanding of the global nature of financial crises, Lords of Finance is a potent reminder of the enormous impact that the decisions of central bankers can have, of their fallibility, and of the terrible human consequences that can result when they are wrong.

With degrees in economics from the Universities of Cambridge and Harvard, Liaquat Ahamed has witnessed at close hand the way countrys' economic policy is made and executed as a professional economist at the World Bank during the 1980s. He has since worked as an investment manager, with a ring-side seat at a sequence of financial crises, from the collapse of the European Monetary System in the 1990s to the current 'sub-prime' economic downturn. This is his first book.