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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.
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Most helpful customer reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Masterful,
By Barry McNeil (Edmonton, AB) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Hardcover)
This is a book that everyone should read. Most won't, of course, and 'tis a pity. Lords of Finance will be one of the best finance or history books published this year and quite likely will be one of the best of any book released in 2009.
Admittedly the story of four central bankers in the 1920s and 30s doesn't sound like it would be on anyone's must read list. But Liaquat Ahamed uses the outsize personalities of the bankers of the U.S., Britain, France and Germany to give a human face to the events that led up to the Great Depression. Ahamed deftly limns the personalities with telling details that any literary writer would envy. He's a hedge fund adviser and has worked for the World Bank but his clear, concise prose marks him as a veteran writer. The book is impressively researched - there's a massive bibliography and Ahamed had access to private journals - yet rarely do we feel that he's trying to cram details just to show the research. Ahamed gives us the context, the psyche of the players and public and demonstrates a firm grasp of wide variety of topics. He also judiciously sprinkles in a few salacious details of the foibles of the wealthy and the aristocratic. Although finance is a common thread, the book is jargon free and dips into monetary theory only explain the consequences of the events. The last book that I read that combined prodigious research, clear reporting and, most importantly, a desire to be fair is "The Assassins' Gate", George Packer's superb 2006 account of the American occupation of Iraq. Lords of Finance is perhaps more impressive because the scope is epic and the timeline is longer. Ahamed admirably organizes the chaos into a coherent narrative. He examines the events from four sides - showing how each country reacts to the events. He unabashedly criticizes stupidity and doles out praise. And he tries to do it through the lens of the times rather than with the omniscience of hindsight. Most of us are aware of the troubles of the 1930s but the 1920s were surprisingly turbulent - today's events are a mere tempest in comparison. Most of these events were news to me and I greedily devoured this book to find out what happened next, It takes a rare talent to take complex events and turn it into a readable tale. This book is a triumph.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Background,
By
This review is from: Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Hardcover)
A masterful account of how upright men, committed to an orthodoxy of sound money based on the gold standard set of the fertile grounds for the great depression, given their inability to juggle the outcomes of WW I.
It is accurate with respect to technical details, presents a picture of the individual men committed to values, and does this in clear, straightforward story telling. This is a pleasant read that serves as a cautionary tale for our times about fixed ideas, pragmatism, and politics.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Reads like a gripping thriller!,
By
This review is from: Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Paperback)
In the Pulitzer Prize winning book <em>Lords of Finance</em>, Ahamed turns the seemingly mundane world of central banking into a gripping page-turner worthy of Grisham or LeCarre. It is the story of the dawn of the modern age of monetary policy and the turbulent period of the early 20th century that shaped it, and was shaped by it. More importantly, it reveals how decisions about such things as interest rates and money supply by four central bankers in London, Berlin, Paris and New York laid the foundation for German hyper-inflation of the 1920s, the stock market crash of 1929, the Great Depression and ultimately the rise of Nazism and the Second World War.
Although many of the familiar names of this period, such as Churchill, Hitler and Roosevelt, play key roles in Ahamed's saga, the prime characters are Montagu Norman (of the UK), Benjamin Strong (of the US), Hjalmar Schacht (of Germany) and Emile Moreau (of France). The inter-related lives of these four complicated (and somewhat peculiar) men are recounted in vivid detail from the early days of the century prior to the First World War through to the aftermath of the Second World War, which ultimately led to the abandonment of the gold standard and the international monetary reforms adopted at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire creating the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Ahamed succeeds in both entertaining and informing the reader by combining an adept critique of the economic policy decisions of the time with a very human story of the lives (both successes and failings) of four financial giants of the time whose names are otherwise largely lost to history. The story is particularly poignant given the prominent role that central bankers and their decisions have played in the media during the financial crisis that has gripped the world in recent years.
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