Garson set out to write a book about the global economy, a daunting subject that instills equal amounts of terror and confusion in most ordinary souls. Interest rates and currency exchange speculation do not usually make for riveting, or comprehensible, reading. But the remarkable thing about "Money Makes the World Go Around" is that her investigation of the movement of capital around the world ends up as easy to swallow as that cool Singha beer on a hot day at the beach.

The result is subversive, a sugar-coated exposé of the way the world works that is halfway digested before you realize how radical it truly is. And by then it's too late. You're stuck: Now you know why peasants in Thailand pay the price for bad loans made by Citibank and Chase Manhattan, or why the unrestricted flow of billions of dollars around the globe in a ceaseless search for higher and higher rates of return ends up benefiting very few people.

Garson starts with a simple, disarming conceit. She's going to track "her" money around the world. She takes her book advance and divides it into two parts: One part gets deposited at a small, privately owned bank in upstate New York; the other goes into a big mutual fund. Then she trots about, checking in on the progress of those dollars.

Of course, there's no telling where "her money" actually goes, in any concrete, physical sense. As soon as she makes her deposit to the Bank of Milbrook, for example, it becomes part of a flow of electrons that zips hither and thither in merry chaos. She has to make some arbitrary decisions. The Bank of Milbrook has a relationship with Chase Manhattan, and Chase makes a loan to refinery builders in Thailand, as well as providing a letter of credit to a fish and shrimp importer in Brooklyn. So even if the mathematical abstraction that represents her book advance cannot be pinned down, she still follows the money.

The Free Software Project
Read Andrew Leonard's book-in-progress on Linux and open source -- and post your comments.