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What Have We Learned From the Lords of Finance?

Published: Feb 17, 2009

 Finance       
Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, a new book by long-time hedge fund manager Liaquat Ahamed, was reviewed on the cover of this past Sunday's New York Times Book Review by Joe Nocera, who calls this "beautifully written," "grand, sweeping narrative of immense scope and power" a "magisterial work."

Nocera also wonders if we've learned anything from the missteps taken in the 1920s and 1930s by Lords of Finance's central characters: Federal Reserve Bank of New York's Benjamin Strong, the Bank of England's Montagu Norman, the Banque de France's Emile Moreau and head of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht.

He writes, "Here at this critical moment, with a new administration having just taken office, and with so much riding on its policy responses to the current crisis, Lords of Finance poses an unsettling question. Do we really understand the workings of that delicate machine [the global economy] any better than our forebears did? Or do we only think we do?"

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