'Luckily for all of us, Bob Aliber has updated his monumental work - again. Since so much has happened since the last edition, there was much updating to do, and Aliber has done it well. Isn't it impossible for a book to be a basic, if not encyclopedic, reference work and yet still be sprightly written? Apparently not, for Aliber has done it again.' - Alan S. Blinder, Princeton University, US

ROBERT Z. ALIBER is Professor Emeritus of International Trade and Economics at the Booth Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago. He has been the Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England, the National Westminster Bank Professor of International Finance at the London Business School, a visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies in Washington, and the JPMorgan Prize fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. Among his previous books are The Multinational Paradigm, National Monetary Policies and the International Financial System, and Your Money and Your Life. He brought out the fifth edition of Charles P. Kindleberger's Manias, Panics and Crashes.