Changing Fortunes:: The World's Money and the Threat to American Leadership [Paperback]

Paul A. Volcker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 18, 1993

Former Federal Reserve Board chairman Volcker and Japanese economic policymaker Gyohten review their careers and encounters with presidents and prime ministers. Reveals how economic policy is really made--and how America can restore prosperity. Hardcover reprinted four times. Photos.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Paul Volcker and Toyoo Gyohten enjoyed remarkable careers as economic statesmen for the United States and Japan. Both Volcker, former Federal Reserve Board Chairman, and Gyohten, former vice minister for international affairs at the all-powerful Japanese Ministry of Finance, are graduates of Princeton who began their careers in the 1950s when the United States was beginning to assert itself as an economic superpower and Japan was still rebuilding after the war. Changing Fortunes is the recollections of Volcker and Gyohten about the international monetary affairs of the last four decades as seen from the American and Japanese perspectives.

The book, which is based on a series of lectures given at the Woodrow Wilson School, gives an inside view of all the significant economic events of the last four decades, including the formation of the new monetary system that was negotiated at Bretton Woods in 1944, the Latin American debt crisis of the 1970s, and the interest rate shocks of the late '70s and early '80s. Anyone interested in understanding the current state of world economic affairs will find Changing Fortunes an extremely useful primer. --Harry C. Edwards

From Publishers Weekly

How much of the United States' postwar economic decline was desirable, a shedding of excessive global ambitions, and how much was due to self-inflicted wounds? Volcker, ex-chair of the Federal Reserve Board, and Gyohten, former finance minister of Japan, address this question as they review, in alternating chapters, the decline of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, the oil shocks of the 1970s, efforts to curb inflation and the international debt crisis of the 1980s. Based on a joint lecture series given by the authors at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, this colloquium provides a valuable global perspective on the fragile U.S.-Japanese alliance and the prospects for erecting a new framework for cooperation on foreign trade and exchange rates. Volcker notes with alarm America's protectionist drift, while Gyohten emphasizes that Japan must open its markets and that the U.S. can no longer play the solo role of world policeman. Author tour.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Three Rivers Press (May 18, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812922182
• ISBN-13: 978-0812922189
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #624,413 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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