The bankers, by contrast, moved on

I just finished reading Hassan Malik’s book Bankers and Bolsheviks: International Finance and the Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2018) which is based on his PhD dissertation. I was struck by the close parallels between the excessive risk tolerance that we are seeing in the world today and the complacency and reaching for yield that Malik documents in international lending to Russia between 1906 and 1917.

In his final chapter, Malik describes the sorry fate of small French investors and Russian technocrats after the Russian default of 1918. He then concludes the book with the line that I have used as the title of this post:

The bankers, by contrast, moved on.

In that respect, not much changed between 1918 and 2008.

Posted at 6:15 pm IST on Sat, 29 Jun 2019         permanent link

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