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Financial Founding Fathers: The Men Who Made America Rich. By Robert E. Wright and David J. Cowen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 240 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, index. Cloth, $25.00. ISBN: 0-226-91068-7

stability of the system. While export-led development models prevailing in Asia may be dependent on the value of the dollar and the American consuming public, growth and development in the Middle East are not. A political crisis that would lead Middle Eastern investors and central banks to diversify quickly out of dollars and thus unravel the system rapidly is not difficult to imagine. Even more important, a diplomatic crisis over, for example, the Taiwan Straits, might lead the Chinese central bank to exercise its leverage over the value of the dollar, regardless of whether such a move would contradict the narrow, material incentives facing the Chinese economy. World politics have always been denned by precisely those sorts of strategic decisions, wherein politics trump economics. Similarly, Eichengreen also writes briefly (p. 143) about the Federal Reserve's likely response to a falling dollar, questioning whether the Reserve would allow accelerating inflation or raise interest rates, inducing a recession. Given the susceptibility of the American economy to inexpensive credit and the already wavering commitment of the American public to economic openness, another, unavoidably political, reaction would likely follow. That is, a decisive American turn away from openness to foreign goods or capital might provoke a crisis in the global economy that extends well beyond the resolution of largely macroeconomic imbalances. Still, these are political elaborations on a coherent, convincing historical and economic analysis. Eichengreen's book should be the starting point for the debate about what will happen after the inevitable end of an unsustainable system. With this and his many other books, Eichengreen has established himself as one of the most important voices in that debate.