This is an awesomely good book, which is easy to read and tells an absorbingly interesting story. It traces the financial history of the world from 1914 to the 1930's. The bankers mentioned in the title are Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, Moreau of the Bamque de France, Schacht of Germany, and Ben Strong of the Federal Reserve Bank of N.Y. Their world crashed in 1929 and the years thereafter, and the events of those years are related, with verve and clarity. One shudders to think what would have happened in 2008-2009 if the urgings of the Neanderthals who said the governments of the world should do nothing had been listened to. And the book shows that the Great Depression of the Hoover years was effectually ended (except as to jobs) by the New Deal. This is one of the best books I have ever read on financial history. ( )

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.

According to the author, the Depression resulted from a 'perfect storm'. Several crises occurred within a short time (approx. 2 years). Even the best bankers were hampered by their blinkered dogmatism, which led them to endorse the gold standard. By the time the crises started to happen in the late 20's, the best three bankers had been sidelined. The head of the NY Fed, Benjamin Strong, died in 1928. The heads of the Bank of England and the Reichsbank (respectively Montagu Norman and Hjalmar Schacht) presided over institutions that had lost the wherewithal to effect the emergency measures that were (as they recognized) called for. The two central banking systems that could have effected these measures, those of France and the USA, were poorly led and failed to act. Keynes is the hero of Mr. Ahamed's narrative, since Keynes opposed the gold standard as well as reparations and the re-payment of war debts. ( )

If you want to know why we're in the economic situation that we're in, I suggest reading Lords of Finance. This book gives about 30 years of history and economics-- 1900-1930-- and shows how the four most powerful bankers at that time caused the Great Depression. The author shows the parallels between then and now. ( )