Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

(Joe Nocera NYTBR) - “We have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand.”
So wrote the great economic iconoclast John Maynard Keynes in an essay titled “The Great Slump of 1930,” published in December of that year. Thirteen months had passed since the crash of 1929; the world was living, in Keynes’s words, in “the shadow of one of the greatest economic catastrophes of modern history.”
I shuddered when I read this quotation in “Lords of Finance,” a magisterial work by Liaquat Ahamed, a veteran hedge fund manager and Brookings Institution trustee. Continued

Photo: Library of Congress