Changing Fortunes:: The World's Money And The Threat To American Leadership

Changing Fortunes:: The World's Money and the Threat to American Leadership

Amazon.com ReviewPaul Volcker and Toyoo Gyohten enjoyed remarkable careers as economic statesmen for the United States and Japan. Both Volcker, former Federal Reserve Board Chairman, and Gyohten, former vice minister for international affairs at the all-powerful Japanese Ministry of Finance, are graduates of Princeton who began their careers in the 1950s when the United States was beginning to assert itself as an economic superpower and Japan was still rebuilding after the war. Changing Fortunes is the recollections of Volcker and Gyohten about the international monetary affairs of the last four decades as seen from the American and Japanese perspectives.The book, which is based on a series of lectures given at the Woodrow Wilson School, gives an inside view of all the significant economic events of the last four decades, including the formation of the new monetary system that was negotiated at Bretton Woods in 1944, the Latin American debt crisis of the 1970s, and the interest rate shocks of the late '70s and early '80s. Anyone interested in understanding the current state of world economic affairs will find Changing Fortunes an extremely useful primer. --Harry C. EdwardsA historical survey of the global monetary order discusses oil shocks, floating exchange rates, and the Latin American debt crisis