Came across this one here this past week,The Lexus and the Olive Tree. By Thomas L. Friedman, I liked his book on the 'Russian' mafia,I think I am going to like reading about what he was seeing about Globalization in 2000,as he weaves through the 90's as a journalist for the Times...

.... Welcome to the paperback edition of The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Readers of the original hardback version of the book will notice that several things have changed in this new version. But what has not changed is the core thesis of this book: that globalization is not simply a trend or a fad but is, rather, an international system. It is the system that has now replaced the old Cold War system, and, like that Cold War system, globalization has its own rules and logic that today directly or indirectly influence the politics, environment, geopolitics and economics of virtually every country in the world.

So what has changed? I have reorganized the early chapters to make my core thesis a little easier for the reader to identify and digest, and I have used the year since the book was originally published in April 1999 to gather more evidence and to update and expand the book with all the technological and market innovations that are enhancing globalization even further. I have also re-examined some of the more controversial sub-theses of this book. One is my Golden Arches Theory-that no two countries that both have McDonald's have ever fought a war against each other since they each got their McDonald's. I feel the underlying logic of that theory is stronger than ever, and I have responded to those who have challenged it in the wake of the Kosovo war. Another change is that the chapter originally entitled "Buy Taiwan, Hold Italy, Sell France" is now broken into two parts. The new chapter, called "Shapers, Adapters and Other New Ways of Thinking About Power," builds on a question I raised in the first edition: if economic power in the globalization system was first based on PCs per household in a country, and then on degree of Internet bandwidth per person in a country, what comes next? This chapter tries to answer that question by looking at evolving new ways of measuring economic power in the globalization era. Finally, I have tried to answer some of the most oft-asked questions I got from readers of the first edition: "Now that you have described this new system, how do I prepare my kids for it?" and "Is God in cyberspace?"-which is another way of saying, "Where do moral values fit in?" The new world order is evolving so fast that sometimes I wish this were an electronic book that I could just update every day. My more realistic hope is that when the day comes years from now when this book can no longer reside on the Current Affairs shelf in bookstores, it will find a comfortable home in the History section - remembered among the books that caught the start, and helped to first define, the new system of globalization that is now upon us.
Thomas L. Friedman
Bethesda, Md.
January 2000

Opening Scene:
The World Is Ten Years Old
It's aggravating - we have nothing to do with Russia or Asia. We're just a little domestic business trying to grow, but we're being prevented because of the way those governments run their countries.

- Douglas Hanson, CEO of Rocky Mountain Internet, Inc., speaking to The Wall Street Journal after the 1998 market meltdown forced him to postpone a $175 million junk bond issue.

On the morning of December 8,1997, the government of Thailand announced that it was closing 56 of the country's 58 top finance houses. Almost overnight, these private banks had been bankrupted by the crash of the Thai currency, the baht. The finance houses had borrowed heavily in U.S. dollars and lent those dollars out to Thai businesses for the building of hotels, office blocks, luxury apartments and factories. The finance houses all thought they were safe because the Thai government was committed to keeping the Thai baht at a fixed rate against the dollar. But when the government failed to do so, in the wake of massive global speculation against the baht-triggered by a dawning awareness that the Thai economy was not as strong as previously believed the Thai currency plummeted by 30 percent. This meant that businesses that had borrowed dollars had to come up with roughly one-third more Thai baht to pay back each $1 of loans. Many businesses couldn't pay the finance houses back, many finance houses couldn't repay their foreign lenders and the whole system went into gridlock, putting 20,000 white-collar employees out of work. The next day, I happened to be driving to an appointment in Bangkok down Asoke Street, Thailand's equivalent of Wall Street, where most of the bankrupt finance houses were located. As we slowly passed each one of these fallen firms, my cabdriver pointed them out, pronouncing at each one: "Dead! . . . dead! . . . dead! . . . dead! . . . dead!"
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