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The Bankers Who Broke the World
Penguin Press
February 2009
On Sale: January 22, 2009
576 pages
ISBN: 159420182X
EAN: 9781594201820
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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.
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