Liaquat Ahamed — exclusively represented by BrightSight Speakers bureau — has been a professional investment manager for twenty-five years and currently serves as Director of Putnam Funds. He has worked at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and the New York-based partnership of Fischer Francis Trees and Watts, where he served as chief executive. He is currently an adviser to several hedge fund groups, including the Rock Creek Group and the Rohatyn Group, is a director of Aspen Insurance Co., and is on the board of trustees of the Brookings Institution. Exclusively represented by BrightSight Speakers bureau, Liaquat Ahamed has degrees in economics from Harvard and Cambridge universities.

When the global economy was racked by its worst crisis since the Great Depression, there was a renewed interest in the lessons to be learned from the world economic collapse of the late 1920s. Drawing on his best-selling, Pulitzer-prize winning book, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, Liaquat discusses the insights we can gain from the Great Depression about the forces that cause global financial crises, the similarities between the breakdown in the 1920s and the current meltdown and the actions economic officials need to take in order to reverse the downward spiral in the world economy and avoid a repeat of that cataclysm.