Liaquat Ahamed has spent his career studying the moments when the world’s financial system breaks down—the bad bets, the collective delusions, and the geopolitical accidents that tip economies into catastrophe. Right now, he says, he doesn’t like what he sees.
“Where we are today is frightening,” Ahamed, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, told Fortune in an interview. The historian, whose landmark 2009 book chronicled how four central bankers helped cause the Great Depression, was speaking about America’s national debt—now hovering around $39 trillion—and the mounting risks he sees in the global financial system.
