Liaquat Ahamed

Liaquat Ahamed is the author of Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World. The book was awarded the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for History, the 2010 Spear’s Book Award, the 2010 Arthur Ross Book Award Gold Medal, the 2009 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. For 2009 it was recognized as one of Time magazine’s “Best Books of the Year”, New York Times “Best Books of the Year” and Amazon.com’s “Best Books of the Year”. It was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.
 
The book narrates the events preceding the Black Tuesday stock market crash of 1929 and the disastrous response of the world’s major central banks. It follows the life and actions of the then chiefs of the central banks: Benjamin Strong Jr. of the New York Federal Reserve, Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, Émile Moreau of the Banque de France, and Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank. John Maynard Keynes, a British well-known economist of the time appears on many occasions in the book in a role opposing the central bankers. The main theme of the book is the role played by the central bankers’ insistence to adhere to the gold standard “even in the face of total catastrophe”.

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

Poems

2009

THIS HAS HAPPENED BEFORE.

The current financial crisis has only one parallel: the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and subsequent Great Depression of the 1930s, which crippled the future of an entire generation and set the stage for the horrors of the Second World War. Yet the economic meltdown could have been avoided, had it not been for the decisions taken by a small number of central bankers.

In Lords of Finance, we meet these men, the four bankers who truly broke the world: the enigmatic Norman Montagu of the bank of England, Benjamin Strong of the NY Federal Reserve, the arrogant yet brilliant Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbanlk and the xenophobic Emile Moreau of the Banque de France. Their names were lost to history, their lives and actions forgotten, until now. Liaquat Ahamed tells their story in vivid and gripping detail, in a timely and arresting reminder that individuals – their ambitions, limitations and human nature – lie at the very heart of global catastrophe.

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