Liaquat Ahamed - Lords of Finance: 1929, The Great Depression, and the Bankers who Broke the World
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Lords of Finance: 1929, The Great Depression, and the Bankers who Broke the World: summary, description and annotation
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With a keen sense of history and compelling narrative skills, Liaquat Ahamed gives us a vivid and dramatic account of four men whose actions led to the world economic collapse of the late 1920s.
Many of us presume that the Great Depression resulted from a confluence of inexorable forces beyond any one persons or governments control. In fact, as economist Liaquat Ahamed explains, it was decisions taken by a small number of central bankers that were the primary cause of the economic meltdown.
Meet the neurotic and enigmatic Montagu Norman of the Bank of England; the xenophobic and suspicious Emile Moreau of the Banque de France; the arrogant yet brilliant Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank; and the dynamic Benjamin Strong of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. These men were as prominent then as Alan Greenspan and Hank Paulson are in our time.
Lords of Finance brings a fresh perspective on the origins of financial crises and an arresting reminder that its individuals who lie at the heart of global catastrophe.
From the Hardcover edition.
Many of us presume that the Great Depression resulted from a confluence of inexorable forces beyond any one persons or governments control. In fact, as economist Liaquat Ahamed explains, it was decisions taken by a small number of central bankers that were the primary cause of the economic meltdown.
Meet the neurotic and enigmatic Montagu Norman of the Bank of England; the xenophobic and suspicious Emile Moreau of the Banque de France; the arrogant yet brilliant Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank; and the dynamic Benjamin Strong of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. These men were as prominent then as Alan Greenspan and Hank Paulson are in our time.
Lords of Finance brings a fresh perspective on the origins of financial crises and an arresting reminder that its individuals who lie at the heart of global catastrophe.
From the Hardcover edition.
Liaquat Ahamed: author's other books
Who wrote Lords of Finance: 1929, The Great Depression, and the Bankers who Broke the World? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Farah Ahamed (ed.)
Jeanna Smialek
Ahamed
Allan H. Meltzer
Liaquat Ahamed
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have been thinking about this book now for over a decade. In 1999, Time magazine featured a cover story entitled The Committee to Save the World. The cover depicted three men: Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve Board; Robert Rubin, then secretary of the treasury; and Larry Summers, then deputy secretary of the treasury. The article described how close the world had come to an economic meltdown in 1997 and 1998the big Asian economies of Korea, Thailand, and Indonesia had had to suspend payments on hundreds of billions of dollars of debt, Asian currencies had collapsed against the dollar, Russia had defaulted on its domestic debt, and the hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management, had lost $4 billion of its investors capital, threatening the stability of the entire U.S financial system. The three economist heroes, as Time magazine called them, were able to avert a disaster by acting quickly and aggressively to commit billions of dollars in public funds to stem a panic of proportions not experienced since the 1930s.
While the crisis of 1997 and 1998 was being played out, I was a professional investment manager. In trying to understand the origins of that economic breakdown and the role of central bankers in the drama, I began reading about the history of past upheavals, and in particular about the greatest financial crisis of them all, that which began in 1929 and led to the Great Depression. I discovered that in the 1920s, there was another group of high financial officials, this one dubbed by the press the Most Exclusive Club in the World, which in its day also sought to manage the international financial system. But, instead of averting a catastrophe and saving the world, the committee from the 1920s ended up presiding over the greatest collapse that the global economy had ever seen. This book is the result of that research.
My biggest debts are to Strobe Talbott and Brooke Shearer. Ever since I began serious work on the book in 2004, they have been mentors, promoters, counselors, and editors, painstakingly reading and commenting on each successive draft. I also owe an enormous debt to Timothy Dickinson. He too read and commented on various drafts. With his astounding knowledge of history and his prodigious memory for facts, quotes, and anecdotes, he has helped me to understand much better the wider social and political context in which the events described here took place.
I would also like to thank all those who helped in various ways in the researching and writing of this book: David Hensler, Peter Bergen, and Michael DAmato, whom I press-ganged into reading various sections of the book; Derek Leebaert, who guided me through the ways and byways of embarking on such a venture; Lily Sykes, who was so creative in hunting down documents and old newspapers clippings from archives in France and Germany; Felix Koch, who assisted with translations from German; Sarah Millard, Hayley Wilding, and Ben White at the Bank of England, Joseph Komljenovich and Marja Vitti at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Fabrice Reuz at the Banque de France for their help in tracking down letters, documents, and photographs in their collections; and Reva Narula and Jane Cavolina for so efficiently organizing the footnotes. In addition, thanks to those friends who have listened so patiently to me talk about this book and given their support and encouragement: Michael Beschloss, David and Katherine Bradley, Jessica and Bob Einhorn, Michael Greenfield, Philip and Belinda Haas, John Hauge, Margaret Hensler, Homi Kharas, and Shahid Yusuf.
I would like to express my gratitude to Peregrine Worsthorne for spending an afternoon with me sharing his memories of his stepfather, Montagu Norman.
Over the years, including while researching this book, my whole family and I have benefited from the generosity of Richard and Oonagh Wohanka, who have opened their various homes to us in London, Paris, and most inspiringly Cap dAntibeswhich makes an unlikely but important cameo appearance in this book. Another place in the south of France, Cap Ferrat, shows up in the story. It is therefore fitting that I thank Maryam and Vahid Allaghband. I had few more productive weeks of writing than the one I spent working from the terrace of their villa on Cap Ferrat overlooking the Mediterranean.
I discovered that becoming an author can be a lonely business. I am therefore grateful to all those who have given me an excuse to get away periodically from pouring over old biographies and newspaper articles from the 1920s. I especially want to thank my colleagues at The Rock Creek Group, Afsaneh Beschloss, Sudhir Krishnamurthy, and Siddarth Sudhir and Nick Rohatyn of The Rohatyn Group for allowing me to keep at least one foot in the world of investments.
I had the good fortune to persuade David Kuhn to take me on as a client. He has not simply been my agent but more than anyone else helped give substance to what was at the time only the germ of an idea. I would also like to thank Billy Kingsland.
I have also had the benefit of working with two great editors at Penguin. Scott Moyers provided me with his incisive comments and direction during the early stages and Vanessa Mobley helped shape the book into its final form. I must also thank Ann Godoff for taking a gamble on an unknown and unproven writer. Susan Johnson did a stellar job with the copy-editing while the whole team at Penguin, particularly Nicole Hughes and Beena Kamlani, shepherded the book through the production process with great efficiency.
Finally, I would like to thank my family. My constant companion while writing has been our dog Scout, who took over the armchair in my study. My two daughters, Shabnam and Tara, have now flown the coop, but from afar have humoredand also encouragedtheir father in his endeavor to transform himself from investment manager to writer. No one has been a greater champion of that change than my darling wife, Meena. For thirty years, she has been my anchor. It is to her that this book is dedicated.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The bibliography includes not only works referred to in the text but also a selected list of books and articles on the economic history of the period that I have found useful in my research. The interpretation of the causes of the Great Depression set out here is eclectic. Nevertheless, my thinking has been framed by four books in particular: the classic by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States 1857-1960, which highlights the dysfunctional policies and decision making at the Fed; the 1973 book by Charles Kindelberger, The World in Depression , one of the early contemporary books to focus on the global dimension of the economic collapse; and the works of Peter Temin and Barry Eichengreen, especially Temins Lessons from the Great Depression and Eichengreens Golden Fetters, which identify the gold standard as the chief culprit for transmitting depression around the world.
ACAMPORA, RALPH. The Fourth Mega-Market. New York: Hyperion, 2000.
ADAM, H. PEARL. Paris Sees It Through: A Diary 1914-1919. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1919. ADAMTHWAITE, ANTHONY. Grandeur and Misery. London: Arnold, 1995.
AGUADO, IAGO Gil. The Creditanstalt Crisis of 1931 and the Failure of the Austro-German Customs Union Project. The Historical Journal 44 (2001): 199-221.
ALDCROFT, Derek H. From Versailles to Wall Street. Berkeley: University of California, 1977. _______________ Currency Stabilization in the 1920s: Success or Failure? Economic Issues 7 (2002): 83-102.
ALLEN, FREDERICK L. Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties. New York: Harper and Row, 1931.
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