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Pulitzer Prize Winners for 2010

Pulitzer Prize for History:
Lords of Finance: 1929, the Great Depression, and the Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed
The current financial crisis has only one parallel: the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and subsequent Great Depression of the 1930s, which crippled the future of an entire generation and set the stage for the horrors of the Second World War. Yet the economic meltdown could have been avoided, had it not been for the decisions taken by a small number of central bankers. In ""Lords of Finance"", we meet these men, the four bankers who truly broke the world: the enigmatic Norman Montagu of the bank of England, Benjamin Strong of the NY Federal Reserve, the arrogant yet brilliant Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbanlk and the xenophobic Emile Moreau of the Banque de France. Their names were lost to history, their lives and actions forgotten, until now. Liaquat Ahamed tells their story in vivid and gripping detail, in a timely and arresting reminder that individuals - their ambitions, limitations and human nature - lie at the very heart of global catastrophe. ""Mr. Ahamed does a superlative job of explaining the ever-germane way the problems of one shyster, one bank, one treasury or one economy can set off repercussions all around the globe,"" a New York Times reviewer wrote.

The book was a finalist for the Samuel Johnson Prize, Britain's leading nonfiction book award. Ahamed said he was working on another book about economic history.

From the 1870s to 1914, the world's developed nations basked in a shimmering age of commerce. The European powers were at peace. Goods flowed home from colonies. The newly reunited United States was growing into muscular adolescence. And all of the world's major economies rested on a seemingly solid base: the gold standard. But it proved to be a system in a snow globe, easily shattered. World War I broke the idyll and unhooked country after country from dependence on gold. They resorted to printing money to fund the war, leading to massive inflation, unemployment, political instability and general suffering across the Continent.It's no wonder, then, that after the signing of the armistice in 1918 the world's four most powerful bankers -- a fraternity described in newspapers of the time as "the world's most exclusive club" -- did everything they could to force nations back to the discipline of the gold standard. It was a ruinous decision. as Liaquat Ahamed notes in Lords of Finance, all the gold mined in history up to 1914 "was barely enough to fill a modest two-story town house." There simply was not enough of it to fund a global conflict or to allow economic recovery afterward.

Liaquat Ahamed

Liaquat Ahamed is an author and investment manager. He has worked at the World Bank in Washington D.C. and the New York-based partnership of Fischer, Francis, Trees and Watts, where he served as Chief Executive.

He was educated at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge.