The Vandals' Crown

Book excerpt: In The Vandals' Crown, Gregory Millman paints a vivid picture of the new revolutionaries, both the famous and the little known, and he reveals the inside story of the revolution that has stripped governments of their power to control money. Today, traders have taken the law into their own hands. Like vigilantes, they enforce fundamental economic laws not for love of law but for profit, regardless of what regulators or central bankers may think. They are the reason why the Japanese government was powerless to stop the collapse of the Tokyo stock market in 1990; why the concerted actions of all the Western European countries were unable to roll back a speculative attack on the European Monetary System in 1992; why the U.S. government was unable to stop the slide of the dollar in 1994; why Mexico, Orange County, and numerous corporate losses made dire headlines in 1994 and 1995. The new financial vigilantes move more than $1 trillion every day in currency alone - more than all the cars, wheat, oil, and other products traded in the so-called "real" economy. The Vandals' Crown may be the most important story in modern financial history.