Ahamed’s emphasis on Norman’s peculiar personal style. That it might have been “the pivotal moment, the turning point that set in train the fateful sequence of events that would eventually lead the world into depression,” is in no way trivialized by Mr. The meeting led the Federal Reserve System of the United States to cut interest rates by half a percentage point to prop up the British pound. If only by virtue of the velvet-collared cape and fan-backed oriental chair he used as accoutrements at a top-secret 1927 meeting on Long Island, Montagu Norman of the Bank of England emerges as this book’s most exotic figure. The four men and their distinctive strategies are wonderfully drawn. Ahamed does a superlative job of explaining the ever-germane way the problems of one shyster, one bank, one treasury or one economy can set off repercussions all around the globe.Īlthough “Lords of Finance” is much more than a personality-driven book, it has personalities to spare. The reader who might not expect to be enthralled by the dangerous mutability of the gold standard, for example, will find it a subject of real fascination. They had been called the “Most Exclusive Club in the World.” In the 1920s the press had been infatuated with an international foursome of elite bankers who took on the challenge of restoring global economic balance after the wreckage created by World War I. Ahamed pondered the article’s headline: “The Committee to Save the World.” He knew, because he obviously knows a great deal of things about a dazzling range of subjects, that the fiscal team of superheroes concept was not new. In 1999, looking at a Time magazine cover photograph of Alan Greenspan (then chairman of the Federal Reserve Board), Robert Rubin (Treasury secretary) and Lawrence Summers (deputy secretary), Mr. He does this winningly enough to make his book about an international monetary horror story seem like a labor of love. Ahamed, an investment manager who proves to be a writer of great verve and erudition, easily connects the dots between the economic crises that rocked the world during the years his book covers and the fiscal emergencies that beset us today.
But there is terrific prescience to be found in its portrait of times past. Liaquat Ahamed’s “Lords of Finance” is supposed to be a history book about the economics of World War I and the Great Depression.
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