David Frum Reviews Liaquat Ahameds "Lords Of Finance"

Just added a new review of Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance in the FF Bookclub. It opens:

Americans do not easily imagine the Great Depression as a global event. Yet if asked for a short answer to the question, “What caused the Depression,” the best reply would be: “the First World War.”

The war left every former belligerent except the United States desperately indebted. Germany and Austria, cut off from global finance, had borrowed massively from their own people. Russia and the minor belligerents had borrowed from France. France and Italy had borrowed from Britain. Britain had borrowed from America.

At war’s end, the French and Belgian demands for reparation had piled another load of debt onto the structure.

Read the rest here.