fallen. U.S. companies have become more mobile, both within the U.S. and beyond. Even as the economy has approached full employment, there has been little upward-wage pressure; most American workers, unless they are highly skilled, fear that their employer might relocate to a low-wage part of the United States, North America, or elsewhere on the globe. The winding up of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the establishment of the successor World Trade Organization, much of whose constitution was written by U.S. corporations (such as the clauses on intellectual property rights), has for the first time established a world market in goods and labor. Beyond an underlying weakness of labor law, companies have become much more hawkish in pursuit of maximizing shareholder value in a contextof Asia had mismanaged their financial and political systems. They paid the price with capital flight, currency, and economic collapse. There was a risk in the autumn of 1998 that the contagion would undermine the capital base of the U.S. banking system, but prompt action by Greenspan averted the threat. The United States saved the day.

There is some truth in this, but it is an incomplete view. What is ignored is why the countries of Southeast Asia had fixed their currencies against the dollar in the first place and why, when the inevitable speculative assault came, it was so overwhelming. Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, the United States insisted that the Asian tigers adopt exchange-rate links with the dollar to facilitate inward investment from U.S. multinationals