Pix: Jagan Negi

It’s the ultimate fantasy of every middle-aged executive. Retire from the hurly-burly of the corporate world, settle down in front of a PC, and turn out a tightly worded page-turner that receives rave reviews and stays in the New York Times bestseller long-list for almost a year.

Liaquat Ahamed, 58, is different in one important way from most day-dreaming senior executives who think they have a bestseller inside them waiting to be written — he has actually pulled it off. His magisterial tome Lords of Finance turns a dull arcane tale of central bankers battling the Great Depression of the 1930s into a thrilling page-turner.

Says Ahamed: “I was always a writers’ groupie and I always had fantasies about being a writer. I read books like The Best and the Brightest (about the Kennedy-era) and said to myself ‘I can do this.’”

The Great Depression of the 1930s was, of course, the greatest economic crisis of the last century when millions were thrown out of jobs in Europe and the United States and shanty towns with their residents of newly poor sprang up in places like the heart of New York’s Central Park.

But Ahamed tells the tale differently by focusing on the four central bankers — of Britain, the US, Germany and France — who led the bitter struggle to put the world economy back on even keel. It’s a tale of powerful egos and of one man, Montagu Norman, the governor of the Bank of England, who had always been considered to be infallible.

By an eerie coincidence, Ahamed’s manuscript was handed over to his publishers, just as the economic slowdown of 2008, the second greatest economic crisis of the last 100 years hit the US and Europe. “If nothing else my timing is good. I like to say that I saw it all coming. But if I had seen it coming I would probably have put a big financial bet on it,” says Ahamed, who was born to Indian parents in Kenya and who maintains a holiday home in New Delhi.

For most of his career there was nothing to distinguish Ahamed from other Indian bankers who have built successful careers over the last three decades in Wall Street, Washington and London’s financial district. After graduating first from Cambridge and then from Harvard in Economics, Ahamed went to work at the World Bank in Washington.

He stayed for over a decade, moving on only in 1988 to a private firm Fischer, Francis, Trees and Watt where he managed bond portfolios which was right up his alley — even at the World Bank he had managed its treasury department and looked after its investments. For seven years he headed the company’s office in London.

Though he had built a highly successful career as a bond trader and portfolio manager, Ahamed never gave up on the dream of becoming a writer. He pored over non-fiction masterpieces like The Guns of August (about the tense first month of World War I)and The Best and the Brightest, (the inside story of how John F. Kennedy’s brilliant team led the United States into the Vietnam War) reading them both several times, studying the way the complex and detailed tales had been put together.

His hunt for a riveting subject that would hold the attention of the reading public was carried out over several years. At one point he noted the global economy was, with increasing frequency, being buffeted by a series of crises, each of varying intensity. Says Ahamed: “I thought financial crises were becoming an endemic part of the landscape. There was something unstable about finance. That’s what provoked me to investigate past crises.”

His Eureka moment came though in 1999 when he chanced upon a Time magazine story on the Asian Crisis that was grandly titled The Committee to Save the World. The story was about how three giants of the US financial world — Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers — had been recruited to pull the global economy back from the brink. Says Ahamed: “A collective biography was a way of bringing together different strands. It’s a way of telling a global tale.”

Ahamed’s collective biography format goes back into the past — bringing together four figures who were giants of their time and leading their countries’ efforts to pull out of a depression — Benjamin Strong the chief of the US Federal Reserve, Emile Moreau of the Bank of France, Hjalmar Schacht of Germany’s Reichsbank and Montagu Norman of the Bank of England. Moreau was a schemer who detested his German counterpart. By contrast, Norman and Strong became close friends and allies. Says Ahamed: “The relationship between Norman and Strong, in some ways, mirrored the relationship between their two countries. Nobody was going to listen to the British unless they were with the US.”

Amazingly, Ahamed the novice author was able to achieve exactly what he set out to do — turn this complex tale of four bankers into a financial cliff-hanger. He says: “The hardest thing was to make it a page-turner. The good idea I had was to tell the story through the lives of four men. This gave it a narrative drive.”

In 2004, Ahamed withdrew from the everyday hustle and bustle of the banking world and settled down in front of his computer to see if he could actually pull off his life’s dream. He quickly settled into a routine, writing from about 9am each morning to about 2 in the afternoon. “If I miss my morning I can’t write,” he says.

Besides turning out his bestseller, Ahamed’s also still involved in the corporate world on a part-time basis as a board member of several hedge funds and companies and top think tanks like the Washington-based Brookings Foundation and the New America Foundation.

Inevitably, the Washington-based banker turned writer’s life has changed in more ways than one since becoming a writer. For one thing, after his book came out he has become a star of the literary world. His book has sold 65,000 copies in hardback and another 125,000 in paperback. He also won a Pulitzer for the best history book in 2010. Lords of Finance has been translated into a dozen other languages — even into Vietnamese.

Ahamed now finds he’s asked to give talks in different parts of the world. Also, he says jokingly, he has learnt the art of posing for photographers (his favourite is a photograph taken for gentleman’s magazine GQ). And he’s now writing a second book, also about the world of banking, which is scheduled to be handed in next year. This time Ahamed has dipped even further into the past and is writing a book that will be called Bank Wars about the battle in the 1830s between US President Andrew Jackson and the central banker of that era Nicholas Biddle. “It’s the story of the conflict between Washington and Wall Street in the 1830s. Anti-banking sentiment has a long history,” he says.

What are Ahamed’s predictions about the ups and downs that the world economy is currently facing? He’s optimistic about the coming few years. But points out that there was a time when the Great Depression looked like it had been warded off — only to return with even greater sledgehammer force, destroying jobs and lives until 1933. Ahamed reckons it’s too soon to let down our guard — but whether the world economy goes up or down, he isn’t about to spin a tale around it. He says he’s leaving the task of writing a history of our times to someone else.