Lords of Finance Quotes

“the gold standard was incapable of preventing the sort of financial booms and busts that were, and continue to be, such a feature of the economic landscape. These bubbles and crises seem to be deep-rooted in human nature and inherent to the capitalist system. By one count there have been sixty different crises since the early seventeenth century—the first documented bank panic can, however, be dated to A.D. 33 when the Emperor Tiberius had to inject one million gold pieces of public money into the Roman financial system to keep it from collapsing.”
― Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

“Nothing brings home the fragility of the banking system or the potency of a financial crisis more vividly than writing about these issues from the eye of the storm. 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 unexpected and startling shifts in market sentiment—reinforces the lesson that there is no magic bullet or simple formula for dealing with financial panics.”
― Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

“Watching other people become rich is not much fun, especially if they do it overnight and without any effort.”
― Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

“By one count there have been sixty different crises since the early seventeenth century—the first documented bank panic can, however, be dated to A.D. 33 when the Emperor Tiberius had to inject one million gold pieces of public money into the Roman financial system to keep it from collapsing.”
― Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

“Unlike today, however, when central banks are required by law to promote price stability and full employment, in 1914 the single most important, indeed overriding, objective of these institutions was to preserve the value of the currency.”
― Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

“In December 1930, the Bank of United States, which despite its name was a private bank with no official status, went down in the largest single bank failure in U.S. history, leaving frozen some $ 200 million in depositors’ funds.”
― Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

“Because the value of a currency was tied, by law, to a specific quantity of gold and because the amount of currency that could be issued was tied to the quantity of gold reserves, governments had to live within their means, and when strapped for cash, could not manipulate the value of the currency. Inflation therefore remained low. Joining the gold standard became a "badge of honor," a signal that each subscribing government had pledged itself to a stable currency and orthodox financial policies. By 1914, fifty-nine countries had bound their currencies to gold.”
― Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: 1929, The Great Depression, and the Bankers who Broke the World

“I reflect with a good deal of satisfaction that because our rulers are as incompetent as they are mad and wicked, one particular era of a particular kind of civilization is very nearly over.”
― Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

“Determined to avoid a repeat of the mistakes of the First World War, which had largely been financed by printing money, Keynes designed the framework for paying for this war without as much recourse to inflation.”
― Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

“It was now very obvious that Roosevelt’s strategy was to withhold his cooperation in the hope that conditions would deteriorate so badly before he took office that he would get all the credit for any subsequent rebound.”
― Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

“his inspirational speeches, and his promise of vigorous action to restore prosperity made a sharp contrast with the dour and resentful Hoover.”
― Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

“British banks had an estimated $500 million tied up in Germany”
― Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

“The Reichsbank, hoping that the impact might be contained, kept the rest of the banking system open that day.”
― Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

“But the Wall Street patricians gathering on the evening of December 10 would have found it hard to hide their distaste for bailing out a Jew like Marcus, an ex-garment manufacturer from the Lower East Side who was running a bank that, according to Thomas Lamont’s son, Tommy, was patronized largely by “foreigners and Jews.” Russell Leffingwell, the Morgan partner, described it as a bank “with a large clientele among our Jewish population of small merchants, and persons of small means and small education, from whom all the management were drawn.”
― Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

“There had always been a divide between the WASP houses and the Jewish houses on Wall Street. But firms such as Kuhn Loeb, Lehman Brothers, and J. W. Seligman represented “Our Crowd,” the German Jewish elite, and for all the anti-Semitic bigotries of old dinosaurs like Jack Morgan, these firms were held in very high regard and viewed as reputable and very prestigious institutions.”
― Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

“Noyes took comfort in the fact that no such event seemed remotely on hand.”
― Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

“He had been humiliated in the negotiations and, on his return to Germany, was criticized from all sides—from the left, for having risked the future of Germany on a gamble that had gone badly wrong, and from the right, for having put his signature to a bill that would “shackle” the next two generations.”
― Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

“Having clashed with many strong and ambitious personalities in the German banking and business world, he was full of resentment against colleagues who had at some time outdistanced him.”
― Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

“For four years, Norman had stood on the sidelines and watched powerlessly as the situation in Germany had progressively deteriorated.”
― Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

“The decision to wait those extra days, allowing the old currency to sink by another 80 percent, was a brilliant tactical move. The”
― Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

“What separated Norman from Keynes had less to do with economics and more to do with philosophy and worldview.”
― Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

“These bubbles and crises seem to be deep-rooted in human nature and inherent to the capitalist system.”
― Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

“It was a society that could be smug and complacent, indifferent to the problems of unemployment or poverty.”
― Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

“It is an absurd and silly notion that international credit must be limited to the quantity of gold dug up out of the ground. Was there ever such mumbo-jumbo among sensible and reasonable men?”
― Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

“he showed that inflation was much more than simply prices going up”
― Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

“For despite his liberal family background, he was a typical product of the Kaiserreich—conformist, unquestioningly nationalistic, and fiercely proud of his country and its material and intellectual achievements.”
― Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

“By 1914, fifty-nine countries had bound their currencies to gold.”
― Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

“As the unemployment lines lengthened, banks shut their doors, farm prices collapsed, and factories closed, there was talk of apocalypse.”
― Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

“Read no history—nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.—BENJAMIN DISRAELI”
― Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

“Much of the negotiating had been done prior to the conference between the Americans and the British. At”
― Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World