Lords of Finance

For the past 25 years, Liaquat Ahamed has worked as a professional investment manager. He formerly worked at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and at the New York-based firm Fischer Francis Trees and Watts, where he was Chief Executive. He is currently an adviser to many hedge fund organizations, including the Rock Creek Group and the Rohatyn Group, as well as a director of Aspen Insurance Co. and a member of the Brookings Institution's Board of Trustees. He holds economics degrees from Harvard and Cambridge Universities.

Liaquat Ahamed's nonfiction book Lords of Finance tells the story of the events leading up to and culminating in the Great Depression through the personal histories of the heads of the world's four major central banks at the time: Benjamin Strong Jr. of the New York Federal Reserve, Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, Émile Moreau of the Banque de France, and Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank. Penguin Press released the text on January 22, 2009. The book received generally positive reviews from critics and was awarded the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in History. Because the book was published in the midst of the 2007-2010 financial crisis, the subject matter was deemed extremely relevant to current financial events.

It is often assumed that the Great Depression, which began in 1929, was caused by a series of events beyond the control of any single individual or government. Indeed, as Liaquat Ahamed explains, the decisions of a tiny handful of central bankers were the principal cause of that economic disaster, the consequences of which laid the ground for World War II and reverberated for decades. Among the best books on the financial crisis, Lords of Finance is a powerful reminder, as we continue to battle with economic turbulence, of the huge impact that central bankers' decisions may have, their fallibility, and the awful human repercussions that can occur when they are wrong.

Author: Liaquat Ahamed

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143116800

Ratings: 4.6 out of 5 stars (from 976 reviews)

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