Boom and Madness on the Eve of the Great Depression

"The Prosperity and Madness on the Eve of the Great Depression" (Excerpt from Chapter 15, with deletions)

While President Coolidge was amusing himself in the Black Hills by playing cowboy, on the other side of the continent, far beyond his attention, four international bankers were quietly laying the foundation for the stock market crash and the Great Depression that followed. Although it was not their intention and it was not what they expected, it was exactly what they did. The four men were: Benjamin Strong, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; Sir Montagu Norman, President of the Bank of England; Hjalmar Schacht, head of the German Reichsbank; and Charles List, Vice President of the Bank of France. This was a rather odd combination of four big men: one was eccentric, one was dying, one was a future Nazi, and only one was normal but insignificant at the moment.
They were meeting at the Long Island estate of financier Ogden Mills, a wealthy Republican who had been defeated by Al Smith in the race for governor of New York. Or rather, beaten up. Mills, on the other hand, had become undersecretary of the Treasury in Washington, D.C. He would eventually succeed Andrew Mellon as Treasury Secretary. Ironically, the very mess he was dealing with at the time had been caused by the very gathering he had been well-intentioned (but misguided) to organize.
Mills's mansion is square and looks more like a central bank than a cozy residence, which must have been a familiar sight for bankers. It occupies a prime location on the Gold Coast, surrounded by large gardens. Almost every wealthy family in the United States has a weekend home here, including the Vanderbilts, DuPonts, Astors, Whitneys, Morgans, Hearsts, and Fricks. Some of the places are extremely grand. Banker Otto Kahn's estate has 170 rooms and a restaurant that can accommodate 200 people. Grounds include an 18-hole golf course and a private zoo. Because the surroundings of the estate were not majestic enough, Kahn simply built a hill himself. Other owners of Gold Coast have bought entire villages and razed them to improve their landscapes. At least one person has set up a gate on the road to prevent ordinary people from wandering from the beach and mistakenly entering his land.
The meeting was chaired by Benjamin Strong. He was 55 in the summer of 1927, tall and handsome, but, as financial historian John Brooks puts it, his life was "full of secret pain and illness." In the summer of 1927, he was sick, exhausted, and dying. He was fighting a long and losing battle with a deadly disease. He had tuberculosis. Fortunately, Strong had a good friend, Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, to keep him company. Strong and Norman were very close and often vacationed together, mostly in Maine and the south of France.
Norman was an odd friend, but an even odder head of a central bank. He was fragile and neurotic, and two of his biographers wrote that he was "a strange, lonely man, with a strong neurosis, who was impossible to please." He had what Time magazine called a "very aggressive goatee," liked to wear a wide-brimmed hat and a cape, and looked like a Central European spy and a second-rate magician. He was strongly anti-Semitic, which was a little surprising because his family's roots were said to be traced back to the Sephardic Jews of the Portuguese-speaking southern Europe.