Book excerpt: This book is devoted to a difficult period in the history of the securities market between the First and the Second World Wars. It was then when collapse of the global financial system began. Financial relationships set in the late XIX – early XX centuries around British Empire and London, the main financial centre of the “first globalization” era, were breaking. This long and painful process, complicated by the collapse of the gold standard system, created global imbalances of the 1920s, associated with huge war debts and overflowing gold from Europe to the United States. Those imbalances spawned not only the “Great Crash” in 1929, but also the “Great Depression” of the 1930s, in many ways resembling the “Great Recession” at the beginning of the XXI century.