Money Makes the World Go Around

商家名称	信用等级	购买信息	订购本书
		Money Makes the World Go Around
		Money Makes the World Go Around

基本信息·出版社：Viking Adult
·页码：342 页
·出版日期：2001年02月
·ISBN：0670866601
·条形码：9780670866601
·装帧：精装
·开本：0开 Pages Per Sheet
·正文语种：英语
·外文书名：全球资本之旅

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With the same fresh and fearless inquisitiveness that characterized her classic workplace history, All the Livelong Day, Barbara Garson takes on the marketplace of money. Her quest: to find out who wins and who loses in a world united by the free flow of capital. In a hilarious and instructive tour of the global economy Garson deposits her Viking book advance in a one-branch, small-town bank and in an aggressive mutual fund. From those points of departure, she tracks her money's every stop, talking to the people who touch, use, or are touched by it. Her conversations with Wall Street bankers, Chinese labor contractors and Texas oil company treasurers-all of whom get a piece of her investment-transform our understanding of money. Money Makes the World Go Around is a classic-headed for the same shelf as the new economy works of Michael Moore and Michael Lewis.
作者简介 Barbara Garson is a journalist and author of All the Livelong Day, The Electronic Sweatshop, and the best-selling play, Macbird!, which has sold more than half a million copies.
媒体推荐 From Library Journal
Money does indeed make the world go round, but it shapes the world as well. Journalist, author (All the Livelong Day: The Meaning and Demeaning of Routine Work), and playwright Garson took her advance for writing this book and deposited half in a one-branch bank in Millbrook, NY; the other half went into an aggressive mutual fund. She then followed the paths of the money as it is used by these two institutions. Of course, she could not follow each dollar; she chose representative loans from the Millbrook bank and representative investments by her mutual fund. While she generally approved of the local loans made by the bank, she learned that much of its deposit base is loaned to other banks, which make their loans differently. Conversely, she saw the mutual fund as maximizing shareholder return to the detriment of workers and even national economies. Garson spent some time at corporate meetings, but the bulk of the book concentrates on her observations of and conversations with workers. She makes astute observations, stressing that a concern with maximizing rates of return can lead to great harm at the individual level. Her point is well taken, but the treatment is a bit unbalanced; like William Greider in One World, Ready or Not (LJ 1/97), she downplays the long-term self-regulating effects of the global economy. She concludes with suggestions that the global financial community pay more attention to the local effects of investment strategies. Recommended for larger public libraries and academic libraries A.J. Sobczak, Santa Barbara, CA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Wall Street Journal
...Ms. Garson recounts her travels with a disarmingly balanced combination of amazement and social concern.

Washington Post
...a writer with a gift for character profile and an...eye for the...effect of new money upon old cultures.

Vivian Gornick
No one but Barbara Garson could have made an abstraction like the global economy as concrete, lively, and remarkably human....

Robert Kanigel, author of The One Best Way
Whimsical, yet profoundly serious, full of insight, charm, and good humor....

San Jose Mercury News, March 4, 2001
Garson is a delightful traveling companion, both bold and curious.

Mother Jones, April 2001
Money Makes the World Go Round provides an excellent primer on the dynamic and too-often sinister machinations of the global economy.

Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2001
...this wonderfully instructive report.

Howard Zinn, author of the bestselling A People's History of the United States
...always, her writing is suffused with a passionate concern for ordinary people overwhelmed by the giants of the corporate world.

Andrew Hacker, author of Two Nations and Money: Who Has How Much and Why
Garson is a superb teacher: informative, entertaining, and truly gets you thinking.

编辑推荐 Amazon.com
Many of us consider ourselves fairly knowledgeable about stock and fund investment options, but then maintain some sort of vague money-in-a-sock vision of the money we deposit in our bank accounts. While the notion that it physically sits in the bank's drawers is obviously ludicrous, determining what actually happens to the money seems impossible in our age of split-second electronic transfers and a complicated global economy. In Money Makes the World Go Round however, Barbara Garson has done just that, tracking a one-time deposit on its dizzying journey around the world.

Using half her publisher's advance for this book, Garson deposits $29,500 in a small, family-owned bank in Millbrook, New York. Putting her intrepid journalistic sensibilities to work, Garson then attempts to follow the money as it's put to use, flowing out of her small bank, through much larger ones, and in and out of the accounts and pockets of companies and their employees in the U.S. and Asia. She tracks down players on all levels of this green path--from a senior vice president on Chase's Federal Funds desk to a seafood importer in Brooklyn, and from the head honcho of a Japanese construction firm building an oil refinery in Thailand to a jellyfish exporter in Malaysia--and tells their stories in vivid, colorful detail. Doing more than just stating that the lives of many are affected by the actions of a few, Garson interviews people at the farthest reaches of her money's journey, like fishermen in a small Malay village, a Burmese pipe fitter working illegally in Thailand, and Filipino maids in Singapore. She explores the consequences of a mutual fund investment in a similar manner, taking one of the fund's investments, Sunbeam, and following "Chainsaw Al" Dunlop's restructuring of the company from the top (shareholders) to the bottom (workers at a furniture plant in Tennessee).

Garson, author of All the Livelong Day and The Electronic Sweatshop, is a lively and engaging writer. She appears to hold little interest in the value of her deposit for herself, but is oozing with curiosity about what money can and can't do for its lenders, borrowers, makers, and users around the world. While she tends to go into excruciating detail in relaying the circuitous routes she takes to get to the right people and the conversations she has with them (even recording the phone conversations they have while she is with them), this very detail serves to remind the reader of the convoluted pathways down which her money travels. An intriguing narrative on a subject we usually only think of in numbers. --S. Ketchum


专业书评 From Publishers Weekly
In this high-concept book, Garson (The Livelong Day) puts her publisher's advance against royalties into a local bank account and a mutual fund, then sets out to trace "a few representative uses" of the money around the world as it flows into large financial centers and out to developing countries. Garson, who has written for Newsweek, the New York Times and Harper's, brings a sharp and sympathetic reporter's eye to the effects of the global banking system on real people. In a conversation with a Thai laborer at a Singapore oil refinery in which her money is invested, she learns the costs and benefits of his situation: due to strict migration laws, he cannot leave Singapore to visit his family, but he makes twice what he would at home and is saving money. In another passage, Garson investigates a building permit granted to Caltex, an oil company to which her bank lent money, for a fifth refinery in Thailand, when government policy only allows for only four. While the regional manager insists truthfully that his office does not engage in bribery, she finds that the policy was suddenly reversed and that "some of [her] deposit went into a Thai minister's son-in-law's salary, and some went into U.S. political-campaign funds." From corporate boardrooms and government offices to the streets of Singapore and Penang, Garson navigates disorienting details with skill. Her spirit of adventure and compassionate character sketches elevate the book from a painless lesson in global economics to a minor masterpiece.Agent, Joy Harris. (Feb. 12)Forecast: If Garson is as engaging in person as she is on the page, and her publisher succeeds in booking her widely, this entry will cut a wide swath.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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