 "Breat Book!!!" | 2009-09-28 |
| - Reviewed By User: A1XWM5TFJPBX9X |
| This book gives a detailed and helpful insight on the history and monetary policy of the four major central bankers responsible of the financial collapse that entailed into the great depression |
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| "A 'Lord' of History Writing" | 2009-09-17 |
| - Reviewed By lispec |
| There have been enough thoughtful reviews of this book that I won't rehash the content. I will say only that in all my many, many years of history reading, I have very seldom, if ever, encountered a work that is simultaneously more wonderfully crafted and informative than this. Ahamed is an absolutely splendid writer who is able to explain to the general reader even the most arcane of financial concepts and strategies without a hint of condescension and tells the tale of the Great Depression with compassion, humor and incisiveness. What is most unsettling, of course, is the inescapable conclusion that the four principal characters, all experienced, thoughtful, and generally well-intentioned men, did not understand either the interconnection or the gravity of the financial threats they were trying to quell. One wonders whether their present-day counterparts will be any more successful in re-establishing the world's financial equilibrium. However they fare, you will better understand what is going on, and what is being done to address evolving issues, if you afford yourself the pleasure of reading this marvelous book. |
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 "The Human Side of International Monetary Economics" | 2009-09-17 |
| - Reviewed By neulingbx |
"Lords of Finance" is an odd book. It uses the biographies of central bankers (and Keynes) as a device to retell and popularize the monetary history of the 1920s and early 1930s. The story begins with World War I and Germany's Great Inflation, moves on to international squabbles over debts and reparations, and ends with the Crash of 1929 and the collapse of the world economy. The vista is huge.
In spite of its breadth, "Lords of Finance" is lively and well-written, with touches of droll humor. It is also eerily topical: 2008 was not the first time the global financial establishment imploded under the weight of debt, crazed speculation and financial contagion. However, the sheer timeliness of the book may have caused other Amazon reviewers to overstate its value. For me, the biographic structure is very artificial, and results in the economics getting buried beneath anecdotes and period atmospherics (menus, wine lists, etc.). What economic details there are are based on secondary sources. Too often I thought I was reading Vanity Fair rather than scholarly history.
Bottomline: "Lords of Finance" captures the quirky human dimension of policymaking, showing how even experts can be badly informed, arrogant, or driven by sentiment. However, it breaks no new historical ground and won't be read 10 years from now. Prospective buyers should wait until it is remaindered. In the meantime, they might want to read classics like Barry Eichengreen's "Golden Fetters" or Charles Kindleberger's "The World in Depression." (Galbraith's "The Great Crash" is also superb. It is as super-readable as "Lords of Finance" but is only half the length!) |
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 "Interesting and Intriguing" | 2009-09-07 |
| - Reviewed By User: A13G4KK2GJUS0K |
| An interesting and intriguing account of the great depression of 1929-1933 based upon the actions of the four central bankers who tried to stop it. It is particularly relevant considering the current world wide financial chaos over the last year and the failure of world bankers and political leaders to deal with it. it is especially interesting if one is already somewhat familiar with the leading actors such as Churchill; Norman; Hoover; FDR; and Hitler |
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| "A great and clear exposition of the years from 1914 to the 1930's" | 2009-08-24 |
| - Reviewed By schmerguls |
| As one reads this great book one feels sorry for the people who had to deal with financial affairs of the world in the years following World War I. The insistence on reparations made a world of trouble, and the course of world history would have changed if Maynard Keynes had been listened to in 1919 and in the years thereafter. And I was glad that the people dealing with the crisis of 2008-2009 were not those who said the Government should let the financial troubles of the world work themselves out without government attention. |
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| "A Loquacious History of the Great Depression" | 2009-07-27 |
| - Reviewed By ubaiddhiyan |
In his Acknowledgments Mr. Liaquat Ahamed mentions as inspiration a 1999 Time cover story featuring Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers as "The Committee to Save the World". It was these men who worked together, aggressively and decisively, to prevent the multiple financial and currency crises of Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Russia and LTCM from ballooning into a global financial meltdown. That history looks at some of them less kindly now (think Greenspan) is another story. Mr. Ahamed aspires to tell the story of the events that led to the Great Depression through a similar group of powerful central bankers. This select group was composed of Mr. Benjamin Strong, Governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (1914 - 1928); Mr. Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England (1920 - 1944); Mr. Émile Moreau, Governor of Banque de France (1926 - 1930) and Hjalmar Schacht, President of the Reichsbank (1923 - 1930) described by the popular press of the time as "The Most Exclusive Club in the World". Mr. Ahamed's research is impressive, unfortunately his narrative device is a spectacular failure. Writing a book of financial history with not one or two but four principal protagonists, each of them colorful in his own quirky way and with no clear relationships amongst them, can be a tough task that the author does not successfully accomplish.
I don't normally enjoy biographies and handling four at a time is daunting. The writing does not help with its obsession for awkward and useless details like in the following sentence on page 459 - "Several years before when Roosevelt needed help with the trees on his estate in Hyde Park, his Hudson Valley neighbor and friend Henry Morgenthau introduced him to an obscure fifty-nine-year-old economist, George Warren, professor of farm management at Cornell, under whom Morgenthau had studied as an undergraduate" The 'obscure fifty-nine-year-old economist' is relevant to the chapter where this is taken from but I don't understand (or care) if he gave advice to Roosevelt on his trees and was introduced through Morgenthau, himself making a first appearance in the book. The invocation of Morgenthau's name only becomes clear a few pages later where it is revealed that he became acting secretary of the Treasury. Another such example is on page 319, in the introduction to Benjamin Strong's successor, George Harrison. The detail that Harrison clerked for Oliver Wendell Holmes is perhaps tangentially relevant, that the same position was later held by "Harvey Bundy, father of the Bundy brothers, William and McGeorge, and by Alger Hiss, the senior State Department official later accused of being a Soviet spy" is certainly not. Amusingly, Hiss makes another appearance later in the book in another irrelevant anecdote.
Much of the rest of the book is also a meandering mess. Chapter 14 is an excellent example. It starts with the Dow, careens to Will Durant and General Motors, then dives into the Florida real estate market followed by an anecdote about Adolph Miller and his neighbor Herbert Hoover that seems to have no real bearing on the chapter's broad content. The author then talks about the Fed and the difficulties faced by central bankers, illustrated through some excerpts from Benjamin Strong's diary before smashing right back into Durant. After this whirlwind tour of the American financial and political landscape, the author flies off to Germany and Hjalmar Schacht. All of this in the space of ten pages! Needless to say, it makes for poor narrative flow.
In my opinion the reader would have been much better served if the author had chosen to tell the story either through one main protagonist (Schacht?) or through one of the central banks (the New York Fed?). That he let the Time cover story straitjacket him into such a loose narrative was an avoidable mistake. As I read the book I kept asking myself, what were the editors on this project doing?
So does the book redeem itself at all? Only a little bit in part four. The writing improves and some of the multiple threads come together. I personally had an epiphany about the role of money in a modern economy and understood a little better the role of monetary policy. I do wish the book had been better written (or at least better edited). Unfortunately, in its present form, this is not a book I can recommend. |
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