Crowd outside the New York Stock Exchange, October 1929. via Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Penguin
Lords of Finance
The four central bankers who broke the world.
$22.00
Available · worldwide delivery
- Author
- Liaquat Ahamed
- Publisher
- Penguin
- Published
- January 2009
- Pages
- 0
- Format
- Paperback
- Size
- Standard
- Language
- English
The Library Essay
Orthodoxy Marched Into the Depression
Liaquat Ahamed's history follows the four central bankers who ran the world's money after the First World War, Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, Benjamin Strong of the New York Fed, Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank and Émile Moreau of the Banque de France. All four laboured to rebuild the gold standard, the soundest finance their era knew, and in doing so helped drag the world into the Depression.
Ahamed, an investment manager by profession, wrote it over many years and published in 2009, when readers had fresh reason to care how central bankers fail. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2010. Its lesson is delivered as biography rather than sermon: the men were able, honest by their lights, and wrong together.
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