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Book reviews for "International-mutual-fund" sorted by average review score:

Money Makes the World Go Around: One Investor Tracks Her Cash Through the Global Economy, from Brooklyn to Bangkok and Back

Published in Hardcover by Viking Press (12 February, 2001)

Author: Barbara Garson

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Many of us consider ourselves fairly knowledgeable about stock and fund investment options, but then maintain some sort of vague money-in-a-sock vision of the money we deposit in our bank accounts. While the notion that it physically sits in the bank's drawers is obviously ludicrous, determining what actually happens to the money seems impossible in our age of split-second electronic transfers and a complicated global economy. In Money Makes the World Go Round however, Barbara Garson has done just that, tracking a one-time deposit on its dizzying journey around the world.

Using half her publisher's advance for this book, Garson deposits $29,500 in a small, family-owned bank in Millbrook, New York. Putting her intrepid journalistic sensibilities to work, Garson then attempts to follow the money as it's put to use, flowing out of her small bank, through much larger ones, and in and out of the accounts and pockets of companies and their employees in the U.S. and Asia. She tracks down players on all levels of this green path--from a senior vice president on Chase's Federal Funds desk to a seafood importer in Brooklyn, and from the head honcho of a Japanese construction firm building an oil refinery in Thailand to a jellyfish exporter in Malaysia--and tells their stories in vivid, colorful detail. Doing more than just stating that the lives of many are affected by the actions of a few, Garson interviews people at the farthest reaches of her money's journey, like fishermen in a small Malay village, a Burmese pipe fitter working illegally in Thailand, and Filipino maids in Singapore. She explores the consequences of a mutual fund investment in a similar manner, taking one of the fund's investments, Sunbeam, and following "Chainsaw Al" Dunlop's restructuring of the company from the top (shareholders) to the bottom (workers at a furniture plant in Tennessee).

Garson, author of All the Livelong Day and The Electronic Sweatshop, is a lively and engaging writer. She appears to hold little interest in the value of her deposit for herself, but is oozing with curiosity about what money can and can't do for its lenders, borrowers, makers, and users around the world. While she tends to go into excruciating detail in relaying the circuitous routes she takes to get to the right people and the conversations she has with them (even recording the phone conversations they have while she is with them), this very detail serves to remind the reader of the convoluted pathways down which her money travels. An intriguing narrative on a subject we usually only think of in numbers. --S. Ketchum

Average review score:

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Where do you think the book advanced payment coming from? THe book only tells half of the story.

Highly Recommended!

Some books set out to accomplish the impossible and come admirably close. Barbara Garson's volume is a prime example. Can you deposit money in a little rural bank and really trace its spread across the global monetary system? How do you know that a multi-million dollar loan to, say, shrimp exporters in Thailand, really has anything to do with the actual dollars you deposited? But that's not the point of this book. The author embarks on a whirlwind, worldwide tour of the global financial juggernaut, and shows how money falls like a drop in a pond and emits waves of disruption that seemingly spread out forever. Garson concludes that deregulation needs to be reigned in, a reasonable anticipation of the Enron mess. We from getAbstract highly recommend her book to business people and consumers who want a better feel for what the "global economic order" is all about, why people are protesting at each meeting of the WTO and whether you should be steamed as well.

A book on investing that connects the head to the heart

As a fairly intelligent individual who has never taken an economics course, I've been trying to make sense of the world of investing on my own. The author takes us on her own journey to do the same, and in the process we come to meet the faces and the people behind the whole process. She goes about it with a very open-minded, down to earth approach, and for the most part, doesn't draw a lot of her own conclusions. Rather, she lets you come to your own. At last, some information on investing that is more than just numbers and returns. I highly recommend this book for anyone who is looking for where to invest their money, or is just trying to understand how "money makes the world go around." After having read the book, now I can go to the Reuters newswires and have an understanding of just what is behind the latest news announcements, what they mean in real terms for real people. The book has made me think twice about what it means to be chasing the high returns, and what implications that may have on the lives of others. I found this book to be very heart opening, and my compassion for the world is immense.

The International Encyclopedia of Mutual Funds, Closed-End Funds and Real Estate Investment Trusts

Published in Hardcover by AMACOM (December, 1999)

Authors: Peter W. Madlem, Peter W. Madlem, and E. B. Winton

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Nice Christmas (1998) Gift

The major part of this book is made up of two page wide, single line entries for each fund. Entries consist of the usual stats available for free on-line. It would be worth the price to have this information neatly bound in a book - if the data was current, but it isn't. November 1998 mutual fund data is not much use in November 2001 (will this bull market ever end?). No fault of the authors - but not a good buy now.