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The Money Changers: A Guided Tour Through Global Currency Markets | 
 enlarge | Author: Robert G. Williams
Publisher: Zed Books
Category: Book
List Price: $32.95
Buy New: $24.07
You Save: $8.88 (27%)
New (12) Used (7) Collectible (1) from $24.00
Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 732824
Media: Paperback
Pages: 256
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.9
ISBN: 1842776959
Dewey Decimal Number: 332.45
EAN: 9781842776957
ASIN: 1842776959
Publication Date: July 11, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new book delivered from the UK in 10-14 days.
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Product Description
Currency markets, worth almost $2 trillion per day in trade, link the world together. Yet few people know how they work and why they are prone to instability and bouts of panic. This book, neither a technical manual nor a get-rich-quick tract, takes the reader on a guided tour of the places, the machines, the circuitry and the people involved in moving the world’s money. From the simple to the complex, currency traders, market analysts, money managers and payments systems architects show their workplaces and reveal their day-to-day experiences. The book will give the reader a graphic picture of the geographical and structural organization of global currency markets and the people who operate them. The tour through the volatile and rapidly evolving world of the money changers provides a basic orientation for deciphering complex causes of yet unforeseen financial events.
Book Description
Currency markets, worth almost $2 trillion per day in trade, link the world together. Yet few people know how they work and why they are prone to instability and bouts of panic. This book, neither a technical manual nor a get-rich-quick tract, takes the reader on a guided tour of the places, the machines, the circuitry and the people involved in moving the world’s money. From the simple to the complex, currency traders, market analysts, money managers and payments systems architects show their workplaces and reveal their day-to-day experiences. The book will give the reader a graphic picture of the geographical and structural organization of global currency markets and the people who operate them. The tour through the volatile and rapidly evolving world of the money changers provides a basic orientation for deciphering complex causes of yet unforeseen financial events.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
 Target audience for this book must very tiny December 4, 2008
ML (Singapore)
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
 A fun read to fill in background understanding November 28, 2008
Jason Fossen (Dallas, Tx)
This was a very enjoyable quick book to read about the internal workings of the foreign currency exchange markets. It is not intended for FX daytraders, but traders should find it interesting. It is not intended for academics, but a grad student in a related field will likely find it to be at just the right level of abstraction (not too deep in the weeds and not too superficial). It is mainly written in the form of polished-up interviews, and the author does a great job of breathing life into the representative players he portrays for these markets. Very well done.
Sophisticated economics; great reading. December 5, 2007
Turner McGehee (Hastings, Nebraska)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
Highly recommended. General readers; all levels of undergraduates. --- IngoWalter, March 2007, Choice May 12, 2007
a reader (North Carolina)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
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.
A fine introduction to currency markets for students and the interested general reader March 12, 2007
Craig Matteson (Ann Arbor, MI)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Robert G. Williams has written an entertaining and informative book about how the world currency markets work. He starts with a story about a summer trip he and some students took to Europe and the impact the fluctuations in the local currency against the dollar impacted their budget for the trip and how he was able to manage that best through smarter currency exchange.
The rest of the book has him taking us through the different aspects of currency trade, the size of the market, who the players are, the role of computers and software versus people exchanging currency on the trading floor, the various philosophies of how these markets work, and how currency exchange affects you and me even without our knowing it.
I don't know if all the conversations he discusses in the book are devices to keep what could have been a dry subject more entertaining or if he is doing some very good reporting. In the larger sense, it doesn't matter because we read the book for the information the author shares with us. That he also makes it quite readable is quite an achievement. There are a helpful number of charts, tables, and graphs. They do not get in the way and are all pretty easy to understand.
This is a very good introduction to these important and quite huge markets (bigger than you would likely guess) for the student and the interested general reader. Since the news often talks about the movements of currency and how this or that is over or undervalued, you might want to bolster your own understanding of what is really going on rather than the vague arm waving of the journalists.
This interesting book is a great place to start.
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