![]() | A fact from Lords of Finance appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 12 September 2010 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
| ![]() |
![]() | This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||
|
resource
editThe Global Thinkers' Book Club; Want to think like the world's best minds? Start by reading like them. The Foreign Policy Global Thinkers' 20 most recommended titles. November 28, 2011
1. Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (2009) by Liaquat Ahamed. Recommended by Nancy Birdsall, Deepa Narayan, and Paul Ryan.
Excerpt ...
Liaquat Ahamed profiles the four central bankers -- in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States -- who sought to reconstruct the global financial system after World War I. His findings, however, are not purely historical: "As I write this in October 2008, the world is in the middle of one such panic -- the most severe for seventy-five years, since the bank runs of 1931-1933 that feature so prominently in the last few chapters of this book.… Watching the world's central bankers and finance officials grappling with the current situation -- trying one thing after another to restore confidence, throwing everything they can at the problem, coping daily with the unexpected and startling shifts in market sentiment -- reinforces the lesson that there is no magic bullet or simple formula for dealing with financial panics. In trying to calm anxious investors and soothe skittish markets, central bankers are called upon to wrestle with some of the most elemental and unpredictable forces of mass psychology. It is the skill that they display in navigating these storms through uncharted waters that ultimately makes or breaks their reputation."