Ritzer, George.
Globalization : A Basic Text / George Ritzer.

Similarly illustrative of rapid and extensive global flows is the scandal associated
with the $50 billion Ponzi scheme run by New York financier Bernard Madoff. Ponzi
schemes are historically local in nature involving a process whereby one nearby client
is paid off out of the contributions of another neighbor to the fund. The funds are
never invested, at least successfully, and the scheme collapses when there are not
enough new investments to pay off those seeking to cash in. What was unique about
Madoff is that he ran a global Ponzi scheme. As one expert on Ponzi schemes said:
“there has been nothing like this, nothing that we could call truly g l o b a l . . . . So this
says what we increasingly know to be true about the w o r l d . . . money knows no
borders, no limits.”1 At the heart of this book is the idea that it is not just money, but
virtually everything else, that knows no (or at least fewer) limits in the global age.
This crisis is remaking the globe in ways that will be much clearer by the time
this book is published. Already, it is becoming clearer in its economic aspects and
components, but as we will see throughout this book (and below), it is of utmost
importance not to reduce globalization to economic globalization. Every aspect of globalization
discussed throughout this book will be affected and, in many cases, quite
dramatically. The result is that at least some of what is discussed in these pages will
need to be revisited in light of these changes. However, the basic foci, perspectives,
concepts, and theories offered here will apply to whatever changes are occurring
in, and are in store for, globalization. Change is nothing new to globalization, indeed
it could be argued that change, including cataclysmic events and changes of the
kind now occurring (the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1919, the Great Depression,
WW II), are an integral part of it. More recently, we have seen a variety of economic
crises in, for example, Asia, Russia, and Argentina, that were also part of the process
of globalization. Any useful perspective on globalization must be able to handle
such occurrences.