Markets in the Looking Glass

Book excerpt: Here the author of Unfettered Globalization (1999) provides a fast-paced primer on how markets contribute to wealth creation by boosting our natural trading instinct, and how the same markets may turn dreadful without a minimum of social oversight. Using simple language and analyses, he debunks the ideological predilection of the theory of markets, dots the i's and crosses the t's. He also shows how the international economic institutions have been corrupted and transformed into markets enforcers, uncovers the political dimension of "free trade," and exposes the potential dangers of an uncontrolled international capital market. More specifically, the author provides a lucid, step-by-step account of the Asian currency debacle of 1997, and argues that the Argentine meltdown in 2001, the dot.com and telecom bubbles, and the debt overhang of developing countries, etc., are simply natural outcomes of unfettered markets. This means that globalization cannot be a viable programme in the absence of a global institution empowered to stabilize, to control, and to legitimize its outcomes.