Money Makes the World Go Round. - Review - book review

Progressive, The, Jan, 2001 by Matthew Rothschild

In her latest book, Money Makes the World Go Round (Viking, 2000), Barbara Garson has come up with a terrific concept: tracing her money as banks and mutual funds reinvest it around the world.

She takes a big chunk of her advance for this book and places it in the Bank of Millbrook, which operates cautiously in a small town in New York. She talks to the bankers there, and they tell her that overnight the bank will sell some of her money to Chase Manhattan. Out it goes into the stream of multinational capital.

Swimming along with it goes Garson. She visits Chase Manhattan and talks with the banker who receives the transfer from Millbrook. She discovers that Chase turns some of that money into Eurodollars and lends some of it to companies, including one called JC Sea Foods in Brooklyn, which imports prawns from Asia.

Off to Asia goes Garson. In Thailand, she discovers that giant shrimp boats are polluting the seas and destroying the livelihoods of small fishermen. One former fisherman is a bellboy at the hotel where she's staying. He notices her watching a shrimp boat out the window, and he shakes his head. "Shrimp bad," he says. "Fish gone." While investigating the effects of the loan to JC Sea Foods, she meets up with an old family friend who is an engineer for the oil company Caltex, which also receives loans from Chase, she finds out. And she goes on site at a Caltex refinery in Thailand.

Garson cops to being impressed by capital's creative powers. "I tagged along, predisposed, I guess, to see Asian slums and sweatshops. But the truth is, it was exhilarating. Rapid economic growth means the peasant becomes a laborer, the laborer becomes a welder, the welder becomes a foreman, the foreman becomes a contractor, the contractor becomes a merchant, and the merchant becomes a banker. They may be racing in circles to music they don't control. Still, it's musical chairs played with more chairs than people. That game can be exhilarating."

But then came the Asian crash of 1997. "Suddenly, they were playing musical chairs with many fewer chairs than people. That game feels desperate," Garson writes.

In the second half of the book, which is not quite as interesting as the first, Garson invests in a mutual fund and watches as part of her money gets plowed into Sunbeam just as Chainsaw Al Dunlap takes over as chairman and proceeds to run the company into the ground, throwing thousands out of work. Like Michael Moore chasing GM'S Roger Smith, Garson pursues Dunlap, who acts like a sinfully overpaid boob.

All in all, the book's a fun ride. How could it not be with a paragraph like this:

"Food and justice are the two things I love most in the world. Bangkok was making me schizophrenic. Ordinary people ate the best food and swallowed the worst injustice I'd ever encountered."

Matthew Rothschild is Editor of The Progressive.