Episode III: The New Rules of the Game
With communism discredited, more and more nations harness their fortunes to the global free-market. China, Southeast Asia, India, Eastern Europe, and Latin America all compete to attract the developed world's investment capital, and tariff barriers fall. In the United States Republican and Democratic administrations both embrace unfettered globalization over the objections of organized labor.But as new technology and ideas drive profound economic change, unforeseen events unfold. A Mexican economic meltdown sends the Clinton administration scrambling. Internet-linked financial markets, unrestricted capital flows, and floating currencies drive levels of speculative investment that dwarf trade in actual goods and services. Fueled by electronic capital and a global workforce ready to adapt, entrepreneurs create multinational corporations with valuations greater than entire national economies.
When huge pension funds go hunting higher returns in emerging markets, enterprise flourishes where poverty once ruled, but risk grows, too. In Thailand the huge reservoir of available capital proves first a blessing, then a curse. Soon all Asia is engulfed in an economic crisis, and financial contagion spreads throughout the world, until Wall Street itself is threatened. A single global market is now the central economic reality. As the force of its effects is felt, popular unease grows. Is the system just too complex to be controlled, or is it an insiders' game played at outsiders' expense? New centers of opposition to globalization form and the debate turns violent over who will rewrite the rules.
Yet prosperity continues to spread with the expansion of trade, even as the gulf widens further between rich and poor. Imbalances too dangerous for the system to ignore now drive its stakeholders to devise new means to include the dispossessed lest, once again, terrorism and war destroy the stability of a deeply interconnected world.
Chapter 1: Prologue
Unforeseen risks
A single market no one controls
Title sequence
Who will rewrite the rules?
Chapter 2: The Global Idea
1992: America's economy adrift
Governor Clinton campaigns
Wall Street's agenda
A meeting of minds
Chapter 3: NAFTA: The First Test
Trade becomes the issue
That giant sucking sound
Clinton shifts his ground
Labor betrayed?
Chapter 4: Crossing Borders
Investment pours into Mexico
An American boom
Who wins; who loses?
The balance of bargaining power
Chapter 5: The Global Market
Trade goes invisible
Markets are us
French culture at risk?
Pensions must go global
Chapter 6: Emerging Market Hunters
Capturing returns
Opening borders
No need to be nice
Thwarting Marx's predictions
Chapter 7: Averting a Meltdown: 1994
Assassinations and revolt
Capital gets nervous
Fishing in the Caribbean
Moral risk in Mexico
Chapter 8: The Global Village
Communication explodes
A borderless world
Venture's capital
Talent flows, too
Chapter 9: China and the Tigers
David Lee goes home
China's free-trade zones
Immigration's next wave
Singapore's "miracle"
Chapter 10: The Japanese Paradox
Invincibility evaporates
Economic contradictions
A mountain of bad debt
Killing off new ideas
Chapter 11: Global Contagion Begins
Begging us to borrow
Flaws in the system
Building the bubble
Shorting the baht
Chapter 12: Contagion Engulfs Asia
America doesn't intervene
Indonesia implodes
Economic colonialism?
Korea at the brink
Chapter 13: Russia Defaults
Markets in denial
Countries do go broke
Russia defaults
Panic in action
Chapter 14: The Crisis Reaches America
Long Term Capital Management
Brazil at risk
Is it over yet?
Thailand after the fall
Chapter 15: The Global Debate
New risks, new requirements
Easier said than done
A new locus for rebellion
Anti-globalization is born
Chapter 16: The Battle Joined
The streets of Seattle
A global labor contradiction
Invisible beneficiaries
A free-trade double standard?
Chapter 17: Failure at the Summit
Clinton in a corner
Not seeing eye to eye
Getting off foreign aid
The World Bank under attack
Chapter 18: The Global Divide
Poverty no one can ignore
Can a one-world market help?
Earning legitimacy
Why is it growing worse?
Chapter 19: Capitalism Redefined
A tool for the poor to prosper
What's missing in Peru
Property, law, and trust
On the slopes of Kilimanjaro
Chapter 20: The Bottom End of Globalism
The moral problem
Snake kids
Oliver Twist has a television
Clinton's farewell
Chapter 21: Changing of the Guard
The trade agenda moves forward
Bush meets Fox in Mexico
NAFTA plus
A raison d'etre for the left
Chapter 22: The Battle Resumed
Quebec City, 2001
The revolution will be streamed
Protests without solutions
The wrong diagnosis?
Chapter 23: 9/11
Things can go in another direction
Terrorism and recession
Doha: The next round begins
Increasing the odds for peace