[Book Review] The Lords of Finance

Link to Goodreads.

I should never taken this book as one of those easy reads for `that 15-minutes extra time slot for which there isn't anything productive I could do'. Jumping back and forth along the timeline, the first half of the book carries a complex network of unfamiliar information, which my idle brain simply resits to remember longer than 30 minutes. Coming back to it every few weeks heavy parenting as well as the graduate school, I was always starting the book all over again, agonizingly flipping through the first 40 pages. 

That's why it took 4.5 years for me to finish the book. I bought it in Chicago O'hare Airport right after dropping off my mother-in-law, who was with us just for about two months when Alex was born, at the gate as I learned the flight was would be delayed. No wonder I am a bit emotional now.

Turning to the book itself, it's about four central bankers who attempted to save their national economies that were at the verge of collapse in the inter-war period. As with any hero stories, there's a good, masterful one (Montagu Norman of the Bank of England), a brilliant but perhaps too cool one (Benjamin Strong of New York Fed), a maverick (Emile Moreau of Banque de France), and the antagonist who survives way too long and thus sort of gets romanticized at the end of the story (Hjlmar Schaat of the Reich Bank).

Some of the things either I newly learned or found important from this book:

- While factors leading to the Depression were stacked up high already, it was really the American politicians who wanted to rein in the illusionary bubbles in the stock market who really instigated the bubbles, which bursted and started the panic.

- No less blamable was the British who longed for restore London's financial supremacy and thus hastily came back to the gold standard, at which point the depression kicked in even before the panic across the Atlantic began.

- Keynes was all cool and right about everything.

- Despite the tumult, the central bankers took extensive periods of vacations. I mean like at least several months a year.


I think I need to come back to this book again at some point after taking in some history books about the inter-war period. Hopefully, by then, I can just enjoy reading it.