Liaquat Ahamed Keynote Speaker

Liaquat Ahamed is an award-winning author and 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. where he headed the bank’s investment division, and the New York-based partnership of Fischer Francis Trees and Watts a subsidiary of BNP Paribas, where he served as Chief Investment Officer and from 2001-2004 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., is on the board of trustees of the Brookings Institution and is involved with the New America Foundation. He has degrees in economics from Harvard University and Trinity College, Cambridge.

His best-selling, Pulitzer-prize winning and Financial Times business book of the year , Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World,  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.