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Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, by Liaquat Ahamed
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"A magisterial work...You can't help thinking about the economic crisis we're 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 person's or government's 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.
- Sales Rank: #31720 in Books
- Brand: Ahamed, Liaquat
- Published on: 2009-12-29
- Released on: 2009-12-29
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.35" h x 1.16" w x 5.42" l, 1.05 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 576 pages
Most helpful customer reviews
211 of 225 people found the following review helpful.
Central Banks in the First 40 years of the 20th Century
By Donald Costello
First, let me say that this is an extremely well written book. I was expecting to have to plow through the usual dreadful writing that finance and economics seems to generate. To my surprise I found a book that was crisp, clear, and interesting. Fun, in fact. Second, the author covers a period and a topic that is sadly neglected in most histories - the inter-war period, and especially the financial events that played a major role in the rise of Hitler and the origins of the Second World War.
The book is primarily the story of 4 Central Banks - those of the US, England, France, and Germany, and of the heads of those banks. The book actually covers a longer span than the inter-war period, it includes important information about the banks just prior to the First World War, their activities during the war, and extends into the Second World War. The lead-in is especially important, because it explains so much of what happened during the inter-war period.
The events are too complicated to review in detail, but the author explains them well and shows how the personalities of the Bankers as well as the politics of the times influenced events. Let us just say, mistakes were made.
My one quibble with the book is that the author is rather unsparing in his criticism of the bankers. Although this is somewhat justified, I ended up feeling sympathetic to at least the heads of the US Federal Reserve and the Governor of the Bank of England. Their primary fault was an inability to see beyond the conventional economic wisdom of the times. In point of fact, the only person who seemed to get it right during this time was Maynard Keynes. If we are to judge everyone against the standard of the most brilliant mind in their field, very very few of us are going to come out well.
The most important point the book makes is how factors other than purely economic issues play a role in making economic decisions, but how the consequences of those economic decisions then rebound onto the wider political history of the times. While the book deals with a different time and political landscape, the parallels to our own times are VERY frightening. The author does not emphasize the parallels, and the book was actually completed before many parallel events occurred. To my mind that just makes them more compelling.
313 of 339 people found the following review helpful.
The Four Bankers of Apocalypse
By Izaak VanGaalen
Liaquat Ahamed, a former World Bank economist and investment fund manager, began research on this book long before the current financial crisis, having no idea of the relevance it would have upon its publication. It is a history of the financial and economic turmoil that began in 1914 and didn't really end until after World War II. He traces the development of this crisis through the lives and actions of four central bankers: Benjamin Strong of the Federal Reserve of New York, Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, Emile Morceau of the Banque de France, and Hjalmer Schacht of the Reichsbank of Germany. The liquidity crisis of 1914 has suddenly become a subject of interest as it bears relevance to today's problems.
Ahamed's central thesis is that the critical decisions made by these four bankers not only caused the Great Depression but also created the conditions for World War II. The most fateful event of all was the decision to adhere to the gold standard. In retrospect, tying the amount of currency a country has in circulation to the amount of gold it has in its vaults appears arbitrary and nonsensical. However, it seemed like a good idea at the time, it provided a universal standard against which countries could stablize their currencies. Unfortunately it became a straight jacket which gave them little room to maneuver.
When the big four bankers came into power in the mid-1920s, the use of the gold standard actually seemed to be working, currencies were stabalized and capital was once again flowing. The problem however was that there was not enough gold in existence to proide enough capital to finance world trade. According to Ahamed, this was the central flaw in the financial system that led to the Crash of 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression. Of course, the chain of events was more complicated than that and Ahamed recognizes the complexity. Each of the four bankers and their respective countries were pursuing their own agendas as opposed to trying to save the system as a whole, the gold standard was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.
Ahamed has written an interesting history of what otherwise would be a fairly dull story. It makes one think about flaws in the system - like sub-prime mortgages, derivatives and the excessive use of credit - and how things could have been different if they had been recognized earlier.
172 of 196 people found the following review helpful.
Could it happen again?
By David M. Gondek
"I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when looked at in the right way did not become still more complicated."
The author begins the epilogue with this insightful quote but ignores the wisdom of it for most of the preceding chapters.
He acknowledges that Roosevelt "did not even pretend to grasp fully the subtleties of international finance" and that few elements of his New Deal policies "were well thought out, some were contradictory and large parts were ineffectual." He then concludes that the temporary abandonment of the gold standard and the devaluation of the dollar "succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations". The conclusion left for the reader seems to be that Roosevelt advocated many foolish polices and, when it came to economics at least, was extremely naive but that since he devalued the dollar he was ultimately vindicated.
The author should have subtitled the book 'How The Gold Standard Broke The World'. Virtually every chapter implies that the gold standard is the explanation behind all the world's economic disruptions. There is no discussion of what the world might have looked like after Roosevelt's policies if there had been no World War, or worse, if the Allies had lost. Without the benefits of supplying and financing the War and subsequent rebuilding of Europe after the War what would have become of the United States economy? Well, I guess we'll never know...or will we?
Given that Keynesian economics is being recycled to address the current economic crisis perhaps we will finally discover whether deficit spending and currency manipulation are truly panaceas or whether this complicated crisis, when looked at in the right way does not become still more complicated.
It was not the gold standard itself that politicians and opportunists wanted to be rid of. They wanted to be free from dealing with sound accounting and moral principles that interfered with their ambition for increased wealth and perpetuation of power. These are the same 'masters of the universe' who today want to be rid of mark-to-market accounting. It is always defended with arguments about the public good and about 'optimizing' economic activity but somehow, somewhere this kind of capitalism always ensures that the unwashed masses continue to be exploited for the enrichment of the few.
This book is a great example of the syllogism. It lays out a great many facts and details and one main conclusion. Unfortunately the connection between these facts and the conclusion is never adequately defended. The rooster crows and the sun rises and the rest remains virtually unexplored. At best this book should be the beginning of a discussion of the gold standard...certainly not the end.
And, yes, this can happen again. Each generation looks back on those that came before them with a supercilious attitude:
"On August 30, 1914, barely a month into the fighting, Charles Conant of the New York Times reported that the international banking community was very confident that there would not be the sort of unlimited issue of paper [money] and its steady depreciation, which had wrought such inflationary havoc in previous wars. Monetary science is better understood at the present time than in those days, declared the bankers confidently."
It seems that all economic systems and philosophies suffer from the same intrinsic flaw...human nature.
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