Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (2009)

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (2009)

Liaquat Ahamed

With penetrating insights for today, this vital history of the world
economic collapse of the late 1920s offers unforgettable portraits of
the four men whose personal and professional actions as heads of
their respective central banks changed the course of the twentieth
century 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.

Publisher: The Penguin Press (2009)
ISBN: 159420182X

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