The Money Changers

A Guided Tour Through Global Currency Markets

Robert G. Williams

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 run them. It presents a picture of a volatile, and rapidly evolving structure which will help to decipher the complex causes of yet unforeseen global financial events.

Contents

• Introduction: Encounter with a Moneychanger 
• 1. A Glance at Foreign Exchange at Breakfast 
• 2. A Visit to the Local Bank: What Do Money Changers Buy and Sell? 
• 3. How Do Money Changers Arrange Deals? 
• 4. Who Are the Actors in the World’s Biggest Market? 
• 5. Where Deals are Made: Historical Geography of Money Changer Enclaves 
• 6. Professor Smith Gets FX’d in Tokyo: Could He Have Profited from a Currency Forecast? 
• 7. Inside the Trading Room: Philosophies behind Trading Strategies 
• 8. Behind the Fish Tank: What Causes Rates to Change? 
• 9. How Currencies are Delivered: Snapshot of an Evolving System 
• 10. The Big Apple: Electronic Dollar Deliveries through CHIPS 
• 11. Time to Settle Up: CHIPS Closes the International Dollar Day at the New York Fed 4:30-5:00 pm 
• 12. In the City of London after the Russian Default: Anatomy of Currency Storms of the 1990s? 
• 13. The Euro in its Infancy 
• 14. Doubts about the Euro and the new Central Bank 
• 15. Testing the Dollar’s Hegemony: Will the Adjustments be Smooth?

About the Author

Robert graduated Valedictorian from Shades Valley High School in Birmingham, Alabama in 1968. He received a B.A. in Economics from Princeton University in 1971 and a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University in 1978. His work experience includes research economist for the Brookings Institution (1973-75), Guilford College Economics Department (1978-present), and Voehringer Professor of Economics (1993-present).

In 1986 Robert authored Export Agriculture and the Crisis in Central America, a book that came to be used as a text in more than fifty colleges and universities in the US, Canada, and Latin America. His book, States and Social Evolution: Coffee and the Rise of National Governments in Central America (1994), received acclaim from historians and social scientists, and in 1995 was awarded Honorable Mention for the Latin American Studies Association’s 1995 Bryce-Wood Award, that association’s book-of-the-year prize for publications on Latin America. Since 1995 his research attention turned to global financial markets.

Robert received the Guilford College Excellence in Teaching Award in 1986, and he has been a reviewer of scholarly manuscripts for Cornell University Press, Stanford University Press, University of California Press, University of North Carolina Press, and Westview Press.