In this new look at the emerging global economic village, Richard C. Longworth reveals how the globalization of money, trade, and investment is wrenching not only the Third World but the First-World societies that the United States, Japan, and Western Europe so carefully crafted in the decades following World War II.

Longworth explains how global markets work. More important, he goes beyond economics and beyond the Beltway to examine globalization's impact on the people who must live with it. He describes the very different ways each First-World society is coping with globalization - or succumbing to it. Finally, he stresses that, like any economic system, globalization can - and should - be controlled by free people and their governments acting alone or in concert.