Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/author-discusses-bankers-role-in-the-great-depression Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript Author Liaquat Ahamed explores the role of bankers leading up to the Great Depression in his book, "Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World." Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. JEFFREY BROWN: Beneath the veneer of boomtown prosperity, cracks began to appear. Well, that sounds familiar to us today, but it's actually a description of a point in the 1920s, just before the Great Depression hit, when four central bankers from the U.S., England, Germany, and France would make some big decisions that reverberated with huge consequences.The story of those four men and what they wrought is the subject of a new book, "Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World." Its author, Liaquat Ahamed, has worked on Wall Street and at the World Bank and now as an investment fund manager.Welcome to you.LIAQUAT AHAMED, author, "Lords of Finance": Thank you, Jeff. JEFFREY BROWN: It's hard not to jump right into parallels, but take us to that moment in time. It was, like ours, a time of upheaval and change. LIAQUAT AHAMED: Yes, very much so. The world — 1929 was only 10 years after the First World War ended. The First World War left an enormous overhang of debts. And during the '20s, the four central bankers, who are in my book, were trying to rebuild the world, and they were trying to turn the clock back to 1914. And for… JEFFREY BROWN: Before the war changed everything. LIAQUAT AHAMED: Everything, yes. And for a while, they looked as if they succeeded, and they created that veneer of boomtown prosperity. It turned out they were wrong, and things began to fall apart in 1929.