In March 1932, a reporter for the Saturday Evening Post asked John Maynard Keynes, the great economist, if he had seen anything like the Great Depression. Keynes replied, “Yes. It was called the Dark Ages and it lasted 400 years.” Liaquat Ahamed’s brilliant Lords of Finance shows how the disastrous decisions by Benjamin Strong of the Federal Reserve of New York, Emile Morceau of the Banque de France, Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, and Hjalmer Schacht of the Reichsbank of Germany led to the Great Depression and World War II. Their stupid decision to adhere to the gold standard plunged the world economy into a death spiral. Winston Churchill is shown as an ambitious bozo. John Maynard Keynes steals every scene he appears in. Lords of Finance has plenty of application to our current economic meltdown. It’s a great piece of analysis and history. GRADE: A