ON July 14, Norman returned from Basel to find the crisis now spreading to Britain. That evening Robert Kindersley, a director of the Bank of England and head of the London arm of the great investment house of Lazards, asked to see him in private and told him that Lazards itself was in serious trouble. Ironically enough it had little to do with the crisis ravaging Central and Eastern Europe. In the midtwenties, a rogue trader in the Brussels branch of the bank had made a wild bet on the collapse of the French franc and lost $30 million, almost double the bank’s capital. He had managed to cover
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