Lords of Finance: The Idea That Broke the World

The Book Brief Project · Aug 5, 2026 · 11m

Lords of Finance is often remembered as the story of four central bankers whose decisions helped lead the world toward the Great Depression. Liaquat Ahamed gives us Montagu Norman, Benjamin Strong, Hjalmar Schacht and Émile Moreau as powerful, fallible men trying to reconstruct the international financial system after the First World War. But beneath those biographies lies a larger argument: the deeper failure was a shared commitment to the gold standard itself.That commitment shaped decisions across the 1920s and early 1930s. Britain returned to gold in 1925 at its prewar parity, a rate…