The money bazaar

A dollar today is worth only about half as many yen as it was a decade ago. And the Japanese, who broke into the American market by selling bargain-priced goods, are now buying up American companies and real estate at bargain-basement prices. What happened? And who's pulling the strings? The answers lie largely in the arcane world of foreign exchange, an arena where a global elite determines the relative values of world currencies--and hence the worth of every country's.

Goods, services, and capital on the world market. In The Money Bazaar, Andrew Krieger explains how money moves at almost inconceivable speeds, piercing national borders with near impunity, and affecting the worth of every coin and dollar in your pocket. He offers an eye-opening tour of an extraordinarily volatile, unregulated, and immensely profitable market. It is a market composed of an international circle of traders who command huge amounts of capital, cut deals. Between themselves, and benefit from the ups and downs of the world's currencies. Krieger revisits the history of foreign exchange, which was a financial backwater until the United States went off the gold standard in 1971, and tells why central bankers and finance ministers have had so much trouble controlling it. Today, the foreign-exchange market is made up of a vast international network of individuals, bound to one another by computer screens and telephone links. There is no trading floor, no centralized clearinghouse, and no governing body in this trillion-dollar-a-week market. The market exists only to the extent that traders in New York and Singapore, Bahrain and Geneva, London and Tokyo are willing to buy and sell among themselves. To trade on this market is to be a citizen of the world, with interests and opportunities and contacts at virtually every point of the planet. In The Money Bazaar, Krieger describes how currency. Trading works today, its ubiquitous effect on consumers and corporations alike. He illustrates his ab