|  | Author: Liaquat Ahamed
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
List Price: $32.95
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Rating:  61 reviews
Sales Rank: 2361
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 576
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.4 x 2
ISBN: 159420182X
Dewey Decimal Number: 332.10922
EAN: 9781594201820
ASIN: 159420182X
Publication Date: January 22, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: BRAND NEW! May have small publisher mark.
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Showing reviews 56-60 of 61
 Must read. February 17, 2009
Elizabeth R. Martin (Houston, TX)
9 out of 11 found this review helpful
I found this book difficult to put down. It was very interesting and extensively researched. Obviously, the current banking crisis made this a timely book. It presented a good perspective on the global evolution of banking.
 Massive Speculation leads to a Depression.Hoover got it right February 16, 2009
Michael Emmett Brady (Bellflower, California ,United States)
63 out of 73 found this review helpful
The author of this book has done an excellent job in analyzing what the main cause of the Great Depression was.The crucial pages in the book that provide the answer are pp.295-302.It is here that we find Benjamin Strong,in August of 1927, who knew full well that the United States was in the midst of not one ,but two raging, speculative bubbles,one in stocks and the other in real estate,forced through a one half of one percent rate cut that simply fueled the specultive bubbles even further.We find Herbert Hoover,blamed for the Great Depression in the United States,calling the future outcome one hundred percent correctly when he stated that the speculation of the late 1920's would lead to a Depression unless the banker financed speculative build up was stopped.Hoover's attempt to stop the insane rate cut failed.President Coolidge simply pointed out that there was nothing he could do because the Federal Reserve System was independent of the Federal Government.He stated that he had no authority to attempt to get the FRS to reverse the rate cut ,which they eventually did in February ,1928.
Unfortunately,by that time that action was too little and too late.Only a policy of credit restriction applied against speculators might have mitigated the eventual depression.
I highly recommend the book.It puts to rest once and for all the canard ,repeatedly told by Murray Rothbard and Milton Friedman,that the FRS was part of the Federal Government and was controlled by government bureaucrats who told the bankers what to do.It is just the reverse.The bankers were so powerful that they could tell an American president what to do.It is interesting to realize that the bankers have again brought the United States to the edge of financial catastrophe with their highly speculative loan policies
The Mistakes Men Make February 11, 2009
Michael B. Crutcher (Louisville, KY USA)
15 out of 16 found this review helpful
How did the world plunge into the financial crisis of 1929-1933 and are we likely to follow that dismal path today? To probe this question, Liaquat Ahmaed, a professional investment manager, has written an absolutely absorbing economic history. He focuses on the principal players ("The Lords of Finance") in the financial world of the 1920's and 1930's, the central bankers of the United States, Britain, France and Germany. They were regarded at the time as members of the world's most exclusive club. Forgotten men today (and all were men,) Montagu Norman (the U.K.), Benjamin Strong (the U.S.), Hjalmar Schacht (Germany) and Emile Moreau (France) struggled with how to deal with the enormous reparation payments due from Germany under The Versailles Treaty, the likewise huge war debts owned by the victorious powers to the United States, and when to return to the gold standard, which had been abandoned during the war.
These financial titans were "the best and the brightest" of their times and they made error after error in dealing with these problems. As Ahmaed writes, they were a "group of men who understood none of this [the Crash of 1929], whose ideas about the economy were at best outmoded and at worst plain wrong." Germany could never realistically repay its reparations debt. Similarly, Britain and France could never pay back the U.S. for money borrowed during the war. (Of all the allied powers, only Finland finally paid of its World War One debt.) Returning to the gold standard was a huge mistake. Among economists, only Britain's Maynard Keynes realized that the gold standard would hamstring economic growth. (Of course Keynes also realized the futility of reparation payments in his famous book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace.) When the financial crisis struck, none of the central banks adequately played the role of "lender of last resort." While under Roosevelt the Federal Reserve was reformed and the U.S. government took an activist role in the economy, it was a case of too little, too late.
By focusing on the lives of these key bankers, each of who was idiosyncratic, Mr. Ahmaed has produced a fascinating volume, full of interesting personalities (Bernard Barauch, Winston Churchill, Herbert Hoover and Dean Acheson, to name a few). Ahmaed speculates that had Benjamin Strong (head of the New York Fed) not died in 1928, there might have been a figure strong enough to pull together the central bankers for a concerted attack on the financial crisis. (It is also scary to consider that our central bankers today are "the best and the brightest" and may also be making terrible but different mistakes, blinded as they are by the orthodoxy of today's economic thinking.)
Ahmaed writes with grace and style. It is a wonderful achievement for a man who apparently is new to the writing of history. He also explains the mysteries of international finance, gold reserves and currency fluctuations in terms anybody can grasp. For an understanding of the financial climate that led to The Great Depression, and for pure entertainment, The Lords of Finance is highly recommended.
Central Banks in the First 40 years of the 20th Century February 7, 2009
Donald Costello (Bridgewater, NJ United States)
79 out of 86 found this review helpful
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.
The Four Bankers of Apocalypse January 25, 2009
Izaak VanGaalen (San Francisco, CA USA)
128 out of 138 found this review helpful
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.
Showing reviews 56-60 of 61
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