Money Makes the World Go Round (Hardcover)

I'm scared of money. I'm scared of global markets and investment bonds and other long sounding words that hide a flow of money. I'm scared for two reasons, firstly because once money stops being banknotes and starts being interest rates I no longer have any clue how it all works. Secondly, and more importantly I am sure to my gut that there is something deeply immoral and damaging about the way money moves around the world, but I just can't put my finger on what it is.

This book was a god send. It's simple and beautiful, intensely well researched informative and incredibly easy to read. Barbara Garson is a play-write, who knows as much about money as I don't, and yet she wanted to understand what happens to all those dollars as they fly around the world, and why they lead so inevitably to downsizings and currency crashes and people starving in south east asia.

The concept is beautifully simple. She got an advance on a book, I think it was $25,000, and put half in a bank and half in a mutual investment fund. She then spent the next two years following her money as it darted around the world, at each point seeing where her dollars were going, what they were invested in and the consequences of the wealth moving around.

On the way she sees the global economy in all it's moral tatters, from shrimp farms in South East Asia tearing the ecologly apart, to export processing zones in Mexico, and trade unionists in an about to downsize company fighting for their survival. But unlike other books that point out the horrors of Globalisastion, this book suceeds because it tries so hard to show capitalism in it's best light.

At every step along the way Barbara has choices as to which direction to follow her money and rather than seeking out the most damning destinations of her cash she choses the ones with the most potential for doing good. The bank she choses is as close to the "Savings and Loan" in It's a wonderful Life as exists, the small town bank that helps local businesses. And it's a good bank and it understands the businesses it helps and everyone benefits except that...

...except a certain percentage of the money has to go to federal reserve overnight and the long trek of destruction begins. Because her earnest desire to cheer her money on is thwarted at every turn, the overall picture becomes that much more gloomy and devastating and this gives the book it's unique power. Listing the crimes of globalization is one thing, but juxtaposing them with the way it's meant to work, and could so easily work, makes capitalisms failures that much more moving.

The other outstanding feature of this book is that it inadvertantly teaches you economics. The conceit of following the nitty gritty dollars, the actual ones and zeros, means that the complicated interplay and flow of the money markets has to be explained from very first principles, and this is done with extreme care and grace. My anti-globalisation beliefs are now armed with words like federal reserve currency, eurodollar and mutual fund and I can honestly say I know what they mean in terms of things I understand. Dollars and Cents moving around!

This book will interest anyone who is confused by the money markets and concerned about globalisation. You will come away armed and dangerous, you'll know exactly how the system should work, what it actually does and why it's all gone so horribly wrong.

I owe Barbara a huge debt, because before reading this book, money made my head go around and around and around....