A sweeping work of history and analysis, Changing Fortunes chronicles the worlds economic upheavals since 1945 and the challenges to American prosperity and hegemony--from the perspective of two distinguished statesman, an American and a Japanese. Paul Volcker, the legendary former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, and Toyoo Gyohten, one of Japan's leading economic policy makers, have been major figures on the world scene for more than two decades. In Changing Fortunes, they explain the huge changes in the international monetary order both helped to shape. With candor and insight, Volcker and Gyohten explore the decisions and personalities that have influenced the world's economy over the last fifty years.

Changing Fortunes begins with the stability and wealth of the Bretton Woods era and stretches through the financial turmoils of the Vietnam War; the devaluation, floating, and ensuing decline of the dollar; the oil shocks of the 1970s and the Federal Reserves battle against inflation; the Latin American debt crisis; and, finally, the Reagan administration's attempt to manage the international economy after first ignoring the consequences of its policies for the rest of the world. Volcker and Gyohten recount each episode from an American and a Japanese position, offering a uniquely broad view of critical issues. Through keen portraits of the people and the politics of international economics, the authors bring a complex subject to life and address fundamental questions for the world's economic order after the Cold War--a world in which the United States must share the burdens of leadership.

As Paul Volcker writes in the introduction: "How much of the relative decline of the United States was natural, how much of it was desirable, and how much of it came from self-inflicted wounds? Should we, with the help of the Japanese, have worked harder to maintain the Bretton Woods system and the stability its exchange rates provided? Has the breakdown of that system been partly responsible for the slower world growth and greater instability in the past two decades? Where do we go from here without so dominant and enlightened a leader as the United States was at the end of World War II?" Lucid, accessible, and full of challenging insights, Changing Fortunes is essential reading for anyone interested in the world's money--past, present, and future.