What’s on Fed chairman Ben Bernanke’s reading list these days? He was asked that question earlier this month during testimony to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, the government’s investigative posse charged with finding the smoking guns that triggered the financial crisis of 2008 and its evil twin, the Great Recession. One recommendation from the nation’s central banker in chief: Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, which details a fascinating but widely misunderstand bit of history of how the world’s central bankers at the time failed so spectacularly on the eve of the Great Depression.

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