Set roughly 30 years into the future, it follows up and coming executive Chris Faulkner as he plunges into the profitable field of conflict investment. Shorn Associates and other major corporations invest in rebel armies, totalitarian dictatorships, freedom fighters, and terrorists by selling weapons and services in exchange for a percentage of a state's GNP.
The potential for profit is immense, and competition is cut-throat. It's not enough to out-bid a competitor for the opportunity of supplying intelligence gathering services to Cambodia's freedom fighters; rival executives joust for the privilege on race tracks via heavily armoured "battle-wagons". This fiercely competitive business model is bloody but effective: surviving executives are by natural selection more cunning and aggressive than their fallen competitors, and therefore best suited for the job.
Market Forces is less science than fiction, and it certainly doesn't follow in his previous novels' cyberpunk footprints. Certain cyberpunk elements remain, though, such as the dominance of large corporate empires and the Hobbesian nature of everyday life. The novel retains strong dystopian influences throughout and delivers a frighteningly realistic future.
The confluence of the post-hegemonic world order and the triumph of capitalist marketforces has advanced a new view of global peace and security in that the global spread of marketforces and the decreased likelihood of major wars will reinforce a virtuous cycle of economic growth, prosperity, and peace and security.
Optimists argue that the expansion of marketforces and economic interdependence have a pacifying influence on international relations because increased trade and investment among and between nation states serve as an engine for international cooperation and prosperity.
Expanded marketforces accompany uneven patterns of economic growth in which growth of major powers is stagnant due to the law of diminishing returns, while non-major powers enjoy faster rates of growth.
Markets generally rely on price adjustments to provide information to parties engaging in a transaction, so that each may accurately gauge the subsequent change of their welfare.
Markets are efficient when the price of a good or service attracts exactly as much demand as the market can currently supply.
A market can be organized as an auction, as a shopping center, as a complex institution such as a stock market, and as an informal discussion between two individuals.
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