Lords of Finance written by former World Bank official, Liaquat Ahamed, was the winner of the 2009 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award: The ”beautifully written” history of how central bankers’ mistakes led to the Great Depression bowled over the judges and swept away a strong field of finalists to take the £30,000 prize. Liaquat Ahamed said the central bankers at the heart of Lords of Finance were “like 18th century doctors who thought the cure for disease was to draw blood from the patient”. They raised tax rates and interest rates in an effort to keep their crumbling economies tied to the gold standard. In other words, they risked their reputations – and, in some cases, their fragile health – on a misguided and unsuccessful campaign to dodge economic disaster. But at least they showed their successors how not to handle a crisis.

The longlist was announced on Monday for the 2010 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. The Award, which is in its sixth year, aims to identify the book providing the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues.

Goldman Sachs said as a number of books on this year’s longlist address various aspects of the financial crisis, its CEO Lloyd Blankfein is recusing himself as a judge this year. The investment bank said it is delighted to be a founder of the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award and remains enthusiastically committed to recognizing well written books that provide insight into some of the most important business issues of the day.‬

A shortlist of up to six books determined by this year’s Award judging panel will be announced on 16th September. The overall winner of the 2010 Book Award will be announced at the Award Dinner in New York on 27th October 2010. The winning author will receive £30,000 and the other shortlisted authors will each receive £10,000, an increase of £5,000 over previous years.

The books on the longlist are:

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?
Ian Bremmer (Portfolio/Penguin)

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities
John Cassidy (Allen Lane/Penguin Press UK, Farrar, Straus and Giroux US)

Circle of Greed: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Lawyer Who Brought Corporate America to Its Knees
Patrick Dillon and Carl M. Cannon (Random House/Crown Publishing Group, Broadway Books)

Fortune's Fool: Edgar Bronfman, Jr., Warner Music, and an Industry in Crisis
Fred Goodman (Simon & Schuster)

Union Atlantic: A Novel
Adam Haslett (Tuskar Rock/Atlantic Books, Doubleday/Nan A Talese)

The Art of Choosing
Sheena Iyengar (Little, Brown, Twelve/Hachette Group)

The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World
Walter Kiechel (Harvard Business Review Press)

The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World
David Kirkpatrick (Simon & Schuster)

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
Michael Lewis (Allen Lane/Penguin Press UK, WW Norton & Co US)

More Money than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite
Sebastian Mallaby (Bloomsbury, Penguin Press)

All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis
Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera (Portfolio/Penguin)

What Works: Success in Stressful Times
Hamish McRae (Harper Press/HarperCollins)

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy
Raghuram Rajan (Princeton University Press)

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
Matt Ridley (Harper/Fourth Estate, HarperCollins Publishers)

Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System – and Themselves
Andrew Ross Sorkin (Allen Lane/Penguin Press UK, Viking/Penguin US)

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World
Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams (Atlantic Books, Portfolio/Penguin)

The judging panel for the 2010 Award is:

• Lionel Barber, Editor, Financial Times

• Liaquat Ahamed, Author

• Helen Alexander, President, CBI

• Lynda Gratton, Professor of Management Practice, London Business School

• Mario Monti, President, Bocconi University, Honorary President of Bruegel

• Jorma Ollila, Chairman, Nokia; Chairman, Royal Dutch Shell plc

• Shriti Vadera, Adviser to the G20 Presidency, Korea

The award is designed to highlight the book that provides the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues, including management, finance and economics. Entries were invited from publishers of business books in the English language first published between 31st October 2009 and 15th November 2010.

Liaquat Ahamad, author of Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, a book about the causes of the Great Depression: