Maybe if they knew upfront that she was a self-described socialist, with an agenda that includes highlighting the plight of the ordinary worker in the global economy, they would have been a little more discreet. Or maybe not. Garson doesn't try to convince readers that she has the answers to all the world's troubling economic questions. She doesn't evangelize Marxist ideology, or rail shrilly about exploitation and speculation.

She just shows us how it works. She shows us how International Monetary Fund bailouts to countries like Thailand end up leaving some people even poorer than they were before Western money started flowing in. In the second section of her book, which follows her mutual fund investment, she gives us a detailed case study of how "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap was brought in to restructure the Sunbeam appliance company. The "restructuring" -- which really meant little more than handing over cash directly to shareholders -- ended up crippling the company. An old story to those who followed the mergers-and-acquisitions mania of the ‘80s, but Garson tells it with fresh, crisp relevance.

If there's a moral to the story, it is that unrestricted capital flow across borders appears to encourage pure speculation on a grand scale far more than it does actual "productive" investment. And by "productive," Garson means the actual production of real things, goods and services, and not just the simple reselling of shares of stock back and forth between a few well-heeled investors. Garson isn't anti-growth, or anti-business.

She is, however, pro-worker -- which is not at all surprising given her previous efforts to delineate the nature of work in modern society, "All the Livelong Day" and "The Electronic Sweatshop." And workers around the world, as she compellingly demonstrates, are getting the shaft.

We hear the term "globalization" every day now. What does it mean to you?

	Money Makes The World Go Around By Barbara Garson Viking 303 pages Nonfiction Print story E-mail story

From the point of view of finance, globalization means another place to put the money that was accumulating in fewer and fewer hands in the U.S. Starting in about the 1970s, we came to what would have been the every-50-year depression. Money had accumulated in fewer and fewer hands, workers weren't being paid enough to buy what was being produced, the post-war expansion had ended, and from the point of view of financiers, bankers, mutual fund people -- the people that held my money -- all kinds of places in the world had built-in protections against capital flows.

So for example, you might not be allowed to borrow in dollars or yen or marks in Thailand, beyond a certain range. Restrictions of this sort slowed money down ... Starting in the ‘70s, when the banks and insurance companies and the mutual funds began to have more money than they knew what to do with, they battered all those regulations down; they battered down all the doors that would keep their capital out or slow it down. That was globalization.

Is globalization the triumph of the free market?

If you went to the IMF, if you went to the college campuses, you heard people explain how globalization was going to raise all boats, but I never talked to a real banker who said that. It was only, let me in, and if you have rules against it, end them, and let me take my money out as fast as I want.

Early on in your journey, you experienced some difficulties actually finding real loans to track.

That's right. The book took five years to write, and during that five years I begin with Mexico, which was the emerging market. Oh boy, everybody in New York who was into Latin American loans was a real hot shot, but I couldn't find an actual Mexican businessman who had borrowed money to build something constructive -- or even something destructive, like a shrimp farm or a golf course. They complained to me that they couldn't get that money. When Mexico collapsed, it became apparent why. I had an old-fashioned idea: Loans had to be used to build something, or else how could you pay it back? But in Mexico, it was a collusion between my bank, Chase, and Mexican businessmen: The money would go straight there and then bounce straight back to Chase in the form of bank accounts.

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