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Liaquat Ahamed

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World Paperback – Illustrated, December 29, 2009

by Liaquat Ahamed (Author)

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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

“Erudite, entertaining macroeconomic history of the lead-up to the Great Depression as seen through the careers of the West’s principal bankers . . . Spellbinding, insightful and, perhaps most important, timely.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“There is terrific prescience to be found in [Lords of Finance’s] portrait of times past . . . [A] writer of great verve and erudition, [Ahamed] easily connects the dots between the economic crises that rocked the world during the years his book covers and the fiscal emergencies that beset us today." —The New York Times

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 made by a small number of central bankers that were the primary cause of that economic meltdown, the effects of which set the stage for World War II and reverberated for decades. As we continue to grapple with economic turmoil, Lords of Finance is a potent reminder of the enormous impact that the decisions of central bankers can have, their fallibility, and the terrible human consequences that can result when they are wrong.

Print length

576 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Penguin Books
Publication date

December 29, 2009
Dimensions

5.47 x 1.25 x 8.36 inches
ISBN-10

0143116800
ISBN-13

978-0143116806
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“A magisterial work . . . As you learn how the world spiraled into depression . . . you can’t help thinking about the economic crisis we’re living through now.” —The New York Times Book Review

“The rich and charming story of the end of the world.” —Time

“Lords of Finance is highly readable . . . That it should appear now, as history threatens to repeat itself, compounds its appeal.” —Niall Ferguson, Financial Times

“There is terrific prescience to be found in [Lords of Finance’s] portrait of times past . . . [A] writer of great verve and erudition, [Ahamed] easily connects the dots between the economic crises that rocked the world during the years his book covers and the fiscal emergencies that beset us today. He does this winningly enough to make his book about an international monetary horror story seem like a labor of love . . . Mr. Ahamed does a superlative job of explaining the ever-germane way the problems of one shyster, one bank, one treasury or one economy can set off repercussions all around the globe.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“This absorbing study of the first collective of central bankers is provocative, not least because it is still relevant.” —The Economist

“This is narrative history at its most vivid, an epic portrait of how the predecessors of Ben Bernanke, Jean-Claude Trichet and Mervyn King helped shove economies into the abyss in 1929 . . . His reportorial style has the Barbara Tuchman touch. Learned yet unpretentious, he dips into diaries, letters and cables to pull out evocative vignettes . . . Central bankers, [Ahamed] says, can resemble Sisyphus in Greek mythology—condemned to roll a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll down again. Like Alan Greenspan, the four men described here saw their apparent successes melt into failure.” —Bloomberg News

“The parallels evidenced by Ahamed between state of the world financial system then and now add to the fascination of this remarkable achievement in history, biography and analysis.” —Fort Worth Star Telegram

“An outstanding book . . . [Ahamed] found a fascinating frame for relating global economic history from the beginning of World War I until the dying days of World War II.” —The Houston Chronicle

“[Ahamed’s] protagonists’ high-wire efforts to stave off national bankruptcies furnish Ahamed with plenty of drama to highlight his engrossing analysis of the complexities of monetary policy.” —Publishers Weekly

“Erudite, entertaining macroeconomic history of the lead-up to the Great Depression as seen through the careers of the West’s principal bankers . . . Spellbinding, insightful and, perhaps most important, timely.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“Books grounded in history sometimes offer an eerie resonance for contemporary readers. Rarely has that statement seemed truer than with Lords of Finance.” —Steve Weinberger, Dallas Morning News

“[A] wonderful new history” —Newsweek

About the Author

Liaquat Ahamed has been a professional investment manager for 25 years. He has worked at the World Bank in Washington D.C. and the New York based partnership of Fischer Francis Trees and Watts, where he served as Chief Executive. He is currently an adviser to several hedge fund groups, including the Rock Creek Group and the Rohatyn Group, is a director of Aspen Insurance Co. and is on the board of Trustees of the Brookings Institution. He has degrees in economics from Harvard and Cambridge Universities.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; Illustrated edition (December 29, 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 576 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0143116800
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0143116806
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.05 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.47 x 1.25 x 8.36 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #46,505 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #50 in Banks & Banking (Books)
- #71 in Business Ethics (Books)
- #125 in Economic History (Books)

Customer Reviews:
862 ratings

About the author

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Liaquat Ahamed

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Liaquat Ahamed has been a professional investment manager for twenty-five years. He has worked at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and the New York-based partnership of Fischer Francis Trees and Watts, where he served as chief executive. He is currently an adviser to several hedge fund groups, including the Rock Creek Group and the Rohatyn Group, is a director of Aspen Insurance Co., and is on the board of trustees of the Brookings Institution. He has degrees in economics from Harvard and Cambridge universities.

Customer reviews

5 star		70%
4 star		20%
3 star		7%
2 star		2%
1 star		1%

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Top reviews from the United States

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John S. Reid

A fascinating (but incomplete) account of a financial train wreck.

Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2020

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With almost 470 Amazon reviews (as of the time of this writing), what’s left to add? Presumably by this point the reader of this review knows what this book is about – i.e., how the actions of leaders of the central banks of the U.S., Britain, Germany and France ostensibly brought about the Great Depression of the 1930’s. (But that actually sells the narrative short – read more below.)

This book reads like a fascinating novel – but with real-life biographies, and real history, as the background. Ahamed writes for the masses – he does not assume a financial or economic background on the part of the reader. This book is so exceptionally well written that it becomes a page-turner – you just can’t wait to see what happens next! Commendably, the author does not suggest a conspiracy theory among, or incompetence on the part of, the main actors. As indicated below, they were merely further casualties of WWI. Each of the central banks (U.S. Britain, Germany and France) pursued different paths to recovery following the war, and none of them found the right answer. This is probably the result of three main problems: (i) the lack of coordination by the Central Banks in developing a global policy for economic recovery following the war; (ii) a failure on the part of Britain to acknowledge that the global economic landscape had been fundamentally altered by the war; and (iii) a failure on the part of the central actors to understand what was going on. As Maynard Keynes said in 1930 (pg. 374), “We have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand.”

While not a course book on international finance, the author does provide enough details to educate the reader about some of the basics (e.g., the gold standard, international lending, devaluation of currency, and international transfers of capital).

As for my 4-star rating, and the title of this review (about the narrative being incomplete), I recommend reading the following in order to gain a broader perspective: “Hidden History” (Docherty and Macgregor), which suggests (with considerable convincing evidence) that the British manipulated France and Russia into war with Germany in 1914 in order to remove Germany as an economic competitor to Britain. My guess is that the architects behind this scheme (Lord Alfred Milner, in particular) had no clue as to what the economic consequences of war would be – they just had a narrow-focused goal of removing a commercial competitor. Thus, the central characters of “Lords of Finance” were probably just historical casualties of those with deeper, and darker, long term motives. Britain sowed the wind leading up to WWI, and the world reaped the whirlwind afterwards (with Britain refusing to acknowledge that there was, in fact, a whirlwind, trying vainly to reestablish their place of prominence in world finance by going back to an unrealistic pre-war gold-based exchange rate). All of the financial machinations (on the part of all parties) to rebuild the world economy after WWI failed to appreciate one fundamental concept – i.e., at some point creditors stop providing credit when they suspect that they might not be able to get repaid. Once credit stops, the economy flops. This holds true unless the creditors have a source they can tap to continue their bad lending practices – see next paragraph.

I also gave this book a 4-star review because the author never asks – or answers- the fundamental question, “who eventually pays when central banks bail out other banks and nations who have made poor decisions?” The answer is “individual investors and savers.” Case in point: in 2007 an IRA or 401K worth $1 million likely took a 40% hit – i.e., a $400,000 “tax”. Multiply that by say three million such accounts, and suddenly you have $1.2 trillion gone from people’s retirement accounts. Where did all of that wealth go? Answer: to pay for loans by the Fed to bail out Greece, Spain, and bad real estate loans in the U.S. It was basically just a redistribution of wealth – socialism conducted under the guise of “central banking”. Read “The Creature from Jekyll Island” (regarding the establishment, and workings, of the U.S. Federal Reserve system) and you will have any eye-opening education on the truth behind “central banking”.

86 people found this helpful

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Francisco

Long and not very convincing

Reviewed in the United States on June 14, 2019

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This is a good overview about the causes and consequences of the Great Depression.
But it has some problems.
First, it focuses on the life of 4 men that, back then, were the central bankers of the 4 most influential countries on Earth. But, despite the author's effort, this were not really very interesting people.

Second, the author's thesis is that these 4 bankers were responsible for the crash because they failed to respond adequately to the successive crisis. But the author himself exhaustively describes the economic difficulties the western war faced after the World and how the governments of the US, Britain, France and Germany were unable to work together to solve them. So, at the end, these 4 bankers weren't as central to the Crisis as the author suggest (which makes focusing on them even more irrelevant).

24 people found this helpful

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drbob

Great book but long ...

Reviewed in the United States on December 28, 2019

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I am giving the book 5 stars, but readers beware. You have to plow through the early pages to get to the meat o the material. The author has been very thorough in covering the early careers for the four men, he considers primarily responsible for the state of the financial world in 1929/30. Although this background is important, it could have been covered in fewer pages.

This book is a "blow by blow" account of the 1929 stock market crash and the aftermath, and the events that lead to it, starting with the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I. It is like seeing the world economies collapse in slow motion. The author has done a masterful job of covering multiple decades of financial market evolution, and how the strict adherence to the gold standard profoundly influenced the onset of the crisis.

This is the period the lead to the ascendency of Keynesian economic ideas, but Keynes himself is only a small part of the story. I wish the author had given Keynes a larger role in the book. The author rightly points out the although Keynes, through his writings, had been opposed to many of the conventional ideas pursued by the team of four, his treatise on employment was only published well after the recovery was on its way.

Overall a very good book!

12 people found this helpful

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Marc and Susan Osborne

Good account of the lives of powerful bankers, but not successful as economic history

Reviewed in the United States on December 19, 2020

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Whether you like this book will depend on what you want out of it. Mr. Ahamed provides a blow-by-blow account of the decisions taken by monetary policymakers as the world descended into the Great Depression, and includes interesting biographical information about the most important of these policymakers, including, but not limited to, the four central bankers referred to in the title. But most people are going to be interested in this subject only because of the relationship between these bankers' decisions and the Depression. Here, Mr. Ahamed's book is not strong. He writes the book to be accessible to readers with no background in economics, and I don't argue with that decision. But his explanation of the causes of the Depression is watered down to the point that it is incomprehensible. He asserts that central bank policies made the Depression much worse, and many eminent economists agree with him. But you can't learn how they made it worse from his book. Without such an explanation, I ultimately found the book unsatisfying.

4 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Jack

Superb history, readable and informative

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 13, 2017

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This did not turn out to be the book I thought I had ordered, but it proved a compelling read nonetheless. I thought I would get a book the explained the "springs and levers" that connected the Wall Street crash to bank failures to the depression. This was not made clear, and in hindsight it Is clear this book is aimed at a reader more knowledgeable in macroeconomic matters than I am.

Nevertheless, it is a fascinating book, extremely well written ( if not extremely well proofed) and very approachable even if you don't understand clearly some of the cause/effect relationships it talks about. Essentially it is a history of central banking and the growth of the effects of the Gold Standard during the inter war years, told through the roles played by the 4 chief protagonists, the Governors of the central banks of U.K., Germany, France and the New York Fed. Maynard Keynes features prominently and is shown as a key player in the increasing awareness of the limitations of the gold standard. The story focuses on the struggles of these four Governors in trying to deal with the fallout of the post-war reparations imposed on Germany, and the near-bankruptcy of both the UK and French governments during the depression. The US suffered enormously from the post-crash depression, but I never realised just how much it profited from the Allies from its war loans, to the extent that I can't help suspecting that the US took deliberTe action to accelerate the demise of the British Empire to impose its own hegemony. The French national stereotypes are played out again, both in its negotiations of the Reparations and its refusal to countenance meaningful reductions in the face of evidence that Germany would be unable to pay (consider that in today's terms relative to the size of the German Economy, reparations amounted to $2.4 trillion dollars !). The French position on Brexit negotiations (no discussion on Trade without settlement of the "divorce bill") came to mind several times as I read this book.
Anyone looking for a history of the growth of the role and expertise of Central Banks will find this a very useful read. Equally, it presents a very readable history of the main characters, especially the governor of the Central Banks and New York Fed, but also of the roles of FDR, Herbert Hoover and Winston Churchill, as well as John Maynard Keynes in this seminal period in Western economic history. A great read.

15 people found this helpful

Athan

Absolutely stunning.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 9, 2012

Verified Purchase

Eat your hearts out Irving Fisher, John Kenneth Galbraith, Charles Kindelberger, Milton Friedman, Richard Koo and Ben Bernanke. An amateur has written the definitive narrative of the Great Depression.

I have no idea if the author is right about everything he says here. I looked in vain for Smoot-Hawley and could not find any mention. But I don't care. If this book was fiction it would still be a strong candidate for the best book I've ever read. The fact that it takes you through the history of the Great Depression through the lives of arguably four of its biggest protagonists (the heads of the four most important central banks) is a nice bonus.

I went through this doorstop of a tome in less than three days. As an added bonus I found out what happened in the Great Depression in the view of an author who may not be a celebrated economist but is clearly totally engrossed by his subject. I was so excited about it, I sat down my poor dad to tell him the story. That bit did not go so well, he stopped me an hour into my trance.

But I digress. This book is AWESOME.

Makes you want to ask for a sixth star.

7 people found this helpful

M A Mohamed

interesting nook to read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 13, 2015

Verified Purchase

I read this book November 2010. It was hilarious and very informative about the financial challenges Germany faced after the WWI, though this should never be allowed to be an accuse to start a war that had ended the lives over fifty two million people and the creation of the horrifying consideration camps.

As Greece is now facing shocking financial challenges and everyone is asking how at the beginning the EU allowed Greece to fund its social agendas with borrowed money; I thought about revisiting this book and rereading the part where the then German Kaiser and his parliament decided to fund the war with borrowed money, which contributed to the financial challenges and hyperinflation that Germany faced after the war. Hence, i bought this book again in kindle format! What happened to the paper copy that i bought few years ago? I kept sneezing when I try to read it!

The other issue is what will be the end game for Greece and the EUR club, who allowed Greece to borrow more than it could handle? Do we need to punish the ill-fated borrow or do we need to allow them go insolvent for short period of time?

How the remnants of African dictators now feel about the idea of silly borrowing and the doubting fact of repaying both the principle and the interest of what they had borrowed? Is Greece in the same situation than they and the Germans of post WWI were?

Should we come up with a new concept where, when a nation faces what the Germans of WWI , most of 1990s African nations and now Greece is facing, the borrowing politicisations and the lending bank managers are sent to the International Criminal Court; Instead of punishing the an entire nation?

One person found this helpful

Jas

A masterpiece

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 28, 2014

Verified Purchase

This book is a masterpiece of quality research and highly readable writing. It very clearly explains the political, economic and personal influences over the financial health of the inter-war world in a way which a non-economist can understand and even start to empathise with. The book builds up detailed portraits of not only the main central bankers of the period, but also other key characters, as they contribute to an overall narrative which of course involves financial turmoil and ultimately another world war. It is one of the most gripping non-fiction titles I have read in a long time, and I recommend it highly.

One person found this helpful

N. Rey

Excellent

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 19, 2020

Verified Purchase

A good read, full of facts and lessons for the present. History, biography and economics in one.

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