Liaquat Ahamed on the Railroad Bubble That Crashed the World | #642

Today’s guest is Liaquat Ahamed, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, one of the greatest financial history books ever written. His new book is called 1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World. In today’s episode, Liaquat shares the story of the world’s first truly global financial crisis. He walks through the Rothschild-led bond boom that funded railroads on three continents, the German IPO mania sparked by French war reparations, and the monetary blunder of abandoning silver that turned a crash into twenty years of deflation.