ABSTRACT
In global information society, a business opportunity anywhere attracts people from everywhere else. Wherever there is a strong market for a product, there is sure to be competition among suppliers of it, and most likely outside investors will become involved. A market dive in Frankfurt or New York sends tremors around the world, as does a financial crisis in Mexico or Russia or Thailand. The industrial nations competed with one another around the world, aggressively seeking markets for their products and sources of raw materials to keep their industries going. Without the gold standard, national currencies are intimately linked in practice by the international currency market in which the value of a currency is determined in large part by supply and demand. So the emergence of the world's currency market is, like so many other aspects of the global economy, a rather historical development, and its progress has been inseparably connected to changes in communications technology.
