• Complain

Ahamed - Lords of finance: the bankers who broke the world

Here you can read online Ahamed - Lords of finance: the bankers who broke the world full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. City: New York, year: 2009;2014, publisher: Penguin USA, Inc., genre: Science. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

No cover
  • Book:
    Lords of finance: the bankers who broke the world
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Penguin USA, Inc.
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2009;2014
  • City:
    New York
  • Rating:
    4 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 80
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

Lords of finance: the bankers who broke the world: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Lords of finance: the bankers who broke the world" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

Winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize A magisterial work ... You cant help thinking about the economic crisis were living through now.--The New York Times Book Review It is commonly believed that the Great Depression that began in 1929 resulted from a confluence of events beyond any one persons or governments 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 yet another period of economic turmoil makes headlines today, 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.

Ahamed: author's other books


Who wrote Lords of finance: 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.

Lords of finance: the bankers who broke the world — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Lords of finance: the bankers who broke the world" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
Table of Contents TO MEENA Read no historynothing but biography for that - photo 1
Table of Contents

TO MEENA Read no historynothing but biography for that is life without - photo 2
TO MEENA
Read no historynothing but biography, for that is life without theory.
BENJAMIN DISRAELI
Montagu Norman on the Duchess of York August 15 1931 INTRODUCTION ON AUGUST - photo 3
Montagu Norman on the Duchess of York, August 15, 1931
INTRODUCTION
ON AUGUST 15, 1931, the following press statement was issued: The Governor of the Bank of England has been indisposed as a result of the exceptional strain to which he has been subjected in recent months. Acting on medical advice he has abandoned all work and has gone abroad for rest and change. The governor was Montagu Collet Norman, D.S.O.having repeatedly turned down a title, he was not, as so many people assumed, Sir Montagu Norman or Lord Norman. Nevertheless, he did take great pride in that D.S.O after his namethe Distinguished Service Order, the second highest decoration for bravery by a military officer.
Norman was generally wary of the press and was infamous for the lengths to which he would go to escape prying reporterstraveling under a false identity; skipping off trains; even once, slipping over the side of an ocean vessel by way of a rope ladder in rough seas. On this occasion, however, as he prepared to board the liner Duchess of York for Canada, he was unusually forthcoming. With that talent for understatement that came so naturally to his class and country, he declared to the reporters gathered at dockside, I feel I want a rest because I have had a very hard time lately. I have not been quite as well as I would like and I think a trip on this fine boat will do me good.
The fragility of his mental constitution had long been an open secret within financial circles. Few members of the public knew the real truththat for the last two weeks, as the world financial crisis had reached a crescendo and the European banking system teetered on the edge of collapse, the governor had been incapacitated by a nervous breakdown, brought on by extreme stress. The Bank press release, carried in newspapers from San Francisco to Shanghai, therefore came as a great shock to investors everywhere.
It is difficult so many years after these events to recapture the power and prestige of Montagu Norman in that period between the warshis name carries little resonance now. But at the time, he was considered the most influential central banker in the world, according to the New York Times, the monarch of [an] invisible empire. For Jean Monnet, godfather of the European Union, the Bank of England was then the citadel of citadels and Montagu Norman was the man who governed the citadel. He was redoubtable.
Over the previous decade, he and the heads of the three other major central banks had been part of what the newspapers had dubbed the most exclusive club in the world. Norman, Benjamin Strong of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank, and mile Moreau of the Banque de France had formed a quartet of central bankers who had taken on the job of reconstructing the global financial machinery after the First World War.
But by the middle of 1931, Norman was the only remaining member of the original foursome. Strong had died in 1928 at the age of fifty-five, Moreau had retired in 1930, and Schacht had resigned in a dispute with his own government in 1930 and was flirting with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. And so the mantle of leadership of the financial world had fallen on the shoulders of this colorful but enigmatic Englishman with his waggish smile, his theatrical air of mystery, his Van Dyke beard, and his conspiratorial costume: broad-brimmed hat, flowing cape, and sparkling emerald tie pin.
For the worlds most important central banker to have a nervous breakdown as the global economy sank yet deeper into the second year of an unprecedented depression was truly unfortunate. Production in almost every country had collapsedin the two worst hit, the United States and Germany, it had fallen 40 percent. Factories throughout the industrial worldfrom the car plants of Detroit to the steel mills of the Ruhr, from the silk mills of Lyons to the shipyards of Tynesidewere shuttered or working at a fraction of capacity. Faced with shrinking demand, businesses had cut prices by 25 percent in the two years since the slump had begun.
Armies of the unemployed now haunted the towns and cities of the industrial nations. In the United States, the worlds largest economy, some 8 million men and women, close to 15 percent of the labor force, were out of work. Another 2.5 million men in Britain and 5 million in Germany, the second and third largest economies in the world, had joined the unemployment lines. Of the four great economic powers, only France seemed to have been somewhat protected from the ravages of the storm sweeping the world, but even it was now beginning to slide downward.
Gangs of unemployed youths and men with nothing to do loitered aimlessly at street corners, in parks, in bars and cafs. As more and more people were thrown out of work and unable to afford a decent place to live, grim jerry-built shantytowns constructed of packing cases, scrap iron, grease drums, tarpaulins, and even of motor car bodies had sprung up in cities such as New York and Chicagothere was even an encampment in Central Park. Similar makeshift colonies littered the fringes of Berlin, Hamburg, and Dresden. In the United States, millions of vagrants, escaping the blight of inner-city poverty, had taken to the road in search of some kindany kindof work.
Unemployment led to violence and revolt. In the United States, food riots broke out in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and across the central and south-western states. In Britain, the miners went out on strike, followed by the cotton mill workers and the weavers. Berlin was almost in a state of civil war. During the elections of September 1930, the Nazis, playing on the fears and frustrations of the unemployed and blaming everyone elsethe Allies, the Communists, and the Jewsfor the misery of Germany, gained close to 6.5 million votes, increasing their seats in the Reichstag from 12 to 107 and making them the second largest parliamentary party after the Social Democrats. Meanwhile in the streets, Nazi and Communist gangs clashed daily. There were coups in Portugal, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Spain.
The biggest economic threat now came from the collapsing banking system. In December 1930, the Bank of United States, which despite its name was a private bank with no official status, went down in the largest single bank failure in U.S. history, leaving frozen some $200 million in depositors funds. In May 1931, the biggest bank in Austria, the Creditanstalt, owned by the Rothschilds no less, with $250 million in assets, closed its doors. On June 20, President Herbert Hoover announced a one-year moratorium on all payments of debts and reparations stemming from the war. In July, the Danatbank, the third largest in Germany, foundered, precipitating a run on the whole German banking system and a tidal wave of capital out of the country. The chancellor, Heinrich Brning, declared a bank holiday, restricted how much German citizens could withdraw from their bank accounts, and suspended payments on Germanys short-term foreign debt. Later that month the crisis spread to the City of London, which, having lent heavily to Germany, found these claims now frozen. Suddenly, faced with the previously unthinkable prospect that Britain itself might be unable to meet its obligations, investors around the world started withdrawing funds from London. The Bank of England was forced to borrow $650 million from banks in France and the United States, including the Banque de France and the New York Federal Reserve Bank, to prevent its gold reserves from being completely depleted.
Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Lords of finance: the bankers who broke the world»

Look at similar books to Lords of finance: the bankers who broke the world. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Lords of finance: the bankers who broke the world»

Discussion, reviews of the book Lords of finance: the bankers who broke the world and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.