1929, The Great Depression, and the Bankers who Broke the World

Lords of Finance

Samuel Johnson shortlisted &amp; FT/Goldman Sachs WINNER: a vivid, dramatic account of the four men whose personal and professional actions led to the world economic collapse of the late 1920s.

'Highly readable... [Ahamed] cannot have foreseen how timely his book would be.

'Fascinating... a brisk, original, incisive and entertaining account of a crucial time in the world's economic history that continues to affect us all today. Anyone who wants to understand the origins of the economic world we live in would do well to read this book'

One of those rare books - authoritative, readable and relevant - that puts the "story" back into history... a spellbinding, richly human [and] cinematic narrative.

Absorbing [and] provocative, not least because it is still relevant.

'Superlative... a subject of real fascination... Lords of Finance has the flair and wisdom to find a wide readership on the strength of its main ideas.'

With degrees in economics from the Universities of Cambridge and Harvard, Liaquat Ahamed has witnessed at close hand the way countrys' economic policy is made and executed as a professional economist at the World Bank during the 1980s. He has since worked as an investment manager, with a ring-side seat at a sequence of financial crises, from the collapse of the European Monetary System in the 1990s to the current 'sub-prime' economic downturn. This is his first book.

THIS HAS HAPPENED BEFORE. 
 
The current financial crisis has only one parallel: the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and subsequent Great Depression of the 1930s, which crippled the future of an entire generation and set the stage for the horrors of the Second World War. Yet the economic meltdown could have been avoided, had it not been for the decisions taken by a small number of central bankers. 
 
In Lords of Finance, we meet these men, the four bankers who truly broke the world: the enigmatic Norman Montaguof the bank of England, Benjamin Strong of the NY Federal Reserve, the arrogant yet brilliant Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbanlk and the xenophobic Emile Moreau of the Banque de France. Their names were lost to history, their lives and actions forgotten, until now. Liaquat Ahamed tells their story in vivid and gripping detail, in a timely and arresting reminder that individuals - their ambitions, limitations and human nature - lie at the very heart of global catastrophe.

Liaquat Ahamed

Liaquat Ahamed matches his earlier Lords of Finance with a page-turning saga of the world’s first international financial crisis. By pinpointing the essential characters, from the avaricious Jay Cooke in America to the Turkish sultan blowing his budget on a harem of two hundred women to the mysterious Rothschild banking clan, Ahamed makes 1873 seem as alive as today. And in his hands, it is. By confronting the question of what could topple economies across multiple time zones, this master writer comes again to the question of money, over a quarter-century in which prices spiralled out of control—not up, but down—sowing misery for the common man, especially in America. We read with fascination how Gilded Age bankers and statemen missed the yawning danger of deflation—and wonder if those in our time have yet to learn their lesson. A gripping read, Ahamed makes the crisis of 1873 both compelling and accessible.

Roger Lowenstein, author of Ways and Means and Buffet

Liaquat Ahamed has a unique ability to bring financial and monetary history to life. In this superb book, he weaves together the people, forces, and events that led to the global financial crisis of 1873 and then shaped its dire long-term consequences. Not least, he shows how a huge boom-and-bust cycle combined with the decision to make gold the sole monetary anchor, to create a first global ‘great depression'.

Martin Wolf, author of The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism

With his readable prose and agile analysis, Liaquat Ahamed has a talent for telescoping huge financial fiascoes into compact and exciting books. 1873 describes how speculative mania and misguided monetary policy produced debt and deflation that shadowed the final decades of the 19th century. With its cast of colorful villains, this saga contains a wealth of sobering insights that ought to sound a warning in our own hyper-speculative era.

The First Great Depression and the Making of the Modern World

On Friday, 9 May 1873 the Vienna stock market collapsed. Four months later Wall Street was in trouble. Elsewhere, as panic selling spread across financial markets, some countries defaulted on their debts, while the Bank of England was forced to raise its rates to their highest level in a century. It was the first global crash in history. And it was to have calamitous consequences. 
 
In his powerful new book, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lords of Finance tells the epic story of that crash and explores its economic and human costs. He describes how the growth of the international bond market in the 1850s and 60s funded a frenzy of speculation in railways, construction and nation-building. He examines those who became swept up in the boom, from leading bankers like the Rothschild dynasty to national leaders both visionary and venal, to rogues and chancers like the shameless Jay Gould, to such sceptical onlookers as Mark Twain and Karl Marx. He then traces how, in the subsequent panic, investors were left with catastrophic losses, while governments on both sides of the Atlantic rushed misguidedly to reorder the world’s financial system. 
 
As he shows, the blunders made as the crisis unfolded set the stage for twenty years of deflation, and a punitive legacy of aggrieved populism that infected every part of the globe. Amid the crash’s many aftershocks, the US abandoned Reconstruction, European powers staged an economic takeover of the heavily indebted Ottoman Empire, and the principle of international free trade came under pressure. Meanwhile there was a revival of antisemitic movements in Europe that blamed ‘Jewish finance’ for the disaster. 
 
A brilliant evocation of a key turning point in world history, 1873 is also a masterly examination of the unforeseen political and social consequences of financial misjudgements.

Liaquat Ahamed

Praise for 1873

Liaquat Ahamed matches his earlier Lords of Finance with a page-turning saga of the world’s first international financial crisis. By pinpointing the essential characters, from the avaricious Jay Cooke in America to ...

Liaquat Ahamed has a unique ability to bring financial and monetary history to life. In this superb book, he weaves together the people, forces, and events that led to the global financial crisis of 1873 and then sh ...

With his readable prose and agile analysis, Liaquat Ahamed has a talent for telescoping huge financial fiascoes into compact and exciting books. 1873 describes how speculative mania and misguided monetary policy pro ...

Liaquat Ahamed matches his earlier Lords of Finance with a page-turning saga of the world’s first international financial crisis. By pinpointing the essential characters, from the avaricious Jay Cooke in America to ...

Liaquat Ahamed has a unique ability to bring financial and monetary history to life. In this superb book, he weaves together the people, forces, and events that led to the global financial crisis of 1873 and then sh ...

With his readable prose and agile analysis, Liaquat Ahamed has a talent for telescoping huge financial fiascoes into compact and exciting books. 1873 describes how speculative mania and misguided monetary policy pro ...

Liaquat Ahamed matches his earlier Lords of Finance with a page-turning saga of the world’s first international financial crisis. By pinpointing the essential characters, from the avaricious Jay Cooke in America to ...

Liaquat Ahamed has a unique ability to bring financial and monetary history to life. In this superb book, he weaves together the people, forces, and events that led to the global financial crisis of 1873 and then sh ...

With his readable prose and agile analysis, Liaquat Ahamed has a talent for telescoping huge financial fiascoes into compact and exciting books. 1873 describes how speculative mania and misguided monetary policy pro ...

Books by Liaquat Ahamed

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter