Liaquat Ahamed is the author of the critically acclaimed best-seller Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, a book about the lead-up to the Great Depression of 1929-1932. Niall Ferguson praised it in the Financial Times as “highly readable” while Time described it as “the rich and charming story of the end of the world.” The New York Times called the book “a magisterial work” and described Ahamed as “a writer of great verve and erudition” who “easily connects the dots between the economic crises that rocked the world during the years his book covers and the emergencies that beset us today.” Many financial officials, including Ben Bernanke and Paul Volcker, have publicly recommended the book for its insights into the current economic crisis. The book was short-listed for the 2009 BBC-Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction and won the Spears Book Award for the Best Financial History Book of the Year.  
 
Ahamed has been a professional investment manager for twenty-five years. 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 is currently an adviser to several hedge fund groups, including the Rock Creek Group and the Rohatyn Group, is a director of Aspen Insurance Co., and is on the board of trustees of the Brookings Institution and the New America Foundation. In addition he produced the movie The Situation, a political thriller set in Iraq and released in 2007, starring Connie Nielsen and Damian Lewis. Ahamed holds degrees in economics from Harvard and Cambridge universities.