The Money Changers: A Guided Tour Through Global Currency Markets

5 Responses to “The Money Changers: A Guided Tour Through Global Currency Markets”

1. Jackal
   December 6, 2009 at 12:09 pm

   A professor has gone around interviewing currency traders and decides to write a popular book about the subject from an ethnographic standpoint. The target audience is neither academics nor traders. I would describe the target audience as laypersons wanting to learn about the foreign exchange markets, but that are not interested in trading themselves. This must be a tiny, tiny target audience
   Rating: 1 / 5
2. Chris Gardner
   December 6, 2009 at 2:04 pm

   Definitely not a technical treatise like the books written by Boris Schlossberg or Kathy Lien, but does a wonderful job of giving those interested in the fx markets a toe-hold on how the world’s biggest capital market operates. I personally enjoyed the interview section with fx traders and currency strategists at JPMorgan tremendously. However, reading the detailed explanation on how the CHIPs settlement system works was slightly tedious.
   Rating: 4 / 5
3. a reader
   December 6, 2009 at 2:43 pm

   The full review in March 2007, CHOICE, written by Ingo Walter, an eminent scholar in the field of international finance, was helpful to me. Here are some excerpts:
   
   “This is a nontechnical exploration into the mechanics of the foreign exchange market, which Williams (Guilford College) nicely motivates by starting with an ordinary retail transaction–an ATM withdrawal of local currency in a foreign country–and tracing it through the wholesale foreign exchange markets to show what actually happens. In doing so, the author provides an intuitive way to explore the most important and arguably the most efficient market in the world, which makes international trade, investment, and financial transfers possible……The discussion is up-to-date, and the use of dialogue makes the book very accessible to the intelligent but uninformed reader. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers; all levels of undergraduates.” — Ingo Walter, Seymour Milstein Professor of Finance, Corporate Governance and Ethics at the Stern School of Business, New York University.
   Rating: 5 / 5
4. J. Charles Darwin
   December 6, 2009 at 2:56 pm

   This book, as the preface states, “is not a technical manual for
   
   business professionals or a tract on how to get rich betting on
   
   currencies. Rather, it is a guided tour of the places, the machines,
   
   the circuitry, and the people involved in moving world money”.
   
   Given this is what the book is about, it does a wonderful job.
   
   The author is obviously very well read and intelligent and
   
   probably ought to be teaching with Lawrence Summers and Robert J.
   
   Barrow in Cambridge, MA. However, I must confess that I cannot
   
   agree with the author in the final pages of the book where he
   
   tries to make the case for financial austerity given Britain’s
   
   currency crisis from 1958-1968. He calls this section of the
   
   book “Long-run lessons for the dollar’s loss of hegemony”, and
   
   caused me to remember the Jimmy Carter rhetoric that American’s
   
   need to do with less. On pages 233-234 the author states the
   
   United States needs to cut back on borrowing from foreign sources
   
   and states “It would mean a change in relative living standards
   
   for people in the United States, but it would not be the end of
   
   the world”. It is a sad ending for what was a great book up until
   
   that point. And from my point of view is not correct as long as
   
   the Japanese continue at their current savings rate and as long as
   
   the Japanese continue to devalue the yen vis-a-vis the dollar.
   Rating: 4 / 5
5. Turner McGehee
   December 6, 2009 at 3:27 pm

   Robert G. Williams is a broad thinker and a very fine writer. While his books are tightly focused on political economics, they move gracefully through other diverse realms. Religion, anthropology, the arts, literature, communications technology are only a few of the subjects he walks around in. Like Michael Pollan (The Carnivore’s Dilemma), he sees large organizing principles at work in things that are familiar to us all. Like John McPhee, he has an eye for character, and a talent for describing encounters with interesting people who do interesting things.

   Williams’ earlier books dealt with Central American agriculture, so they aimed at a somewhat specialized reader. The Money Changers should be interesting to anyone who wants to know more about how money works. And who doesn’t?

   The Money Changers is Williams’ best book yet. It is a mature, seamless blend of high scholarship and fascinating narrative.
   
   Rating: 5 / 5