Liaquat Ahamed won a Pulitzer Prize for his timely book on the 1929 crash. Kanika Datta meets him
The transition from bond trader to author may be tough for most, but Liaquat Ahamed isn’t showing signs of suffering a great depression. After all, he has earned a raft of prizes, including the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for History, for his first book on the crash of 1929. Published in 2009 but completed in 2008, the year the US banking system collapsed, the deeply researched and readable Lords of Finance: The Bankers who Broke the World proved uncannily prescient.
Currently on an annual family visit to the capital — his wife is Indian — the Kenyan-born Indian seems to have comfortably settled into life as a full-time writer. He has begun work on Bank Wars, a book set a century earlier than his first. To be published by Penguin, the subject is the 1830s battle between Wall Street and Washington. As with Lords of Finance, the new book centres on the people involved, in this case Nicholas Biddle, president of Second Bank of the United States, the de facto central bank, and US President Andrew Jackson. Ahamed, 58, sees some parallels between that face-off and the banking crisis of 2008 in that “Jackson knew nothing about finance and Biddle had a tin ear for politics”.
Ismailimail 