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Speaker: Eamonn Fingleton, author of In Praise of Hard Industries, ...
Topic: Son of Blindside
When: Starting at 6:30 p.m. on Sunday, 06 September 2009
Admission: Buy a copy of In the Jaws of the Dragon from Good Day Books
Eamonn Fingleton is the author most recently of In the Jaws of the Dragon: America's Fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Hegemony (Thomas Dunne Books, 2008). Based on more than 20 years of on-the-spot observation of East Asian economic and political developments, the book challenges the conventional view that, as living standards rise, China will become increasingly Western in its politics and economics. China is instead converging to the East Asian econo-political model, a much misunder-
stood hybrid system fundamentally incompatible with Western traditions and values. Pioneered by Japan after World War II and now widely espoused throughout the Confucian world, this model presages massive problems for today's Western-defined world order that - thanks to the foreign trade lobby's success in fostering extreme pro-globalism attitudes in the American press and in Washington - have been largely swept under the carpet in American discussions. Yet all the evidence shows that, when East Asian and Western systems compete head-to-head, the former prove decisively more effective than the latter in creating trade surpluses and building national economic power, while Western nations that pursue free trade find themselves increasingly "hollowed out" and dependent on foreign creditors.
Fingleton is also the author of In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, Is the Key to Future Prosperity (Houghton Mifflin, September 1999). This book, which presented a point-by-point rebuttal of the exaggerated claims then being made for the New Economy, was vindicated when the Wall Street dot.com bubble burst in the spring of 2000. The book was named one of the ten best business books of 1999 by Amazon.com Business Editor Harry C. Edwards. It was also named one of the Ten Books That Matter by The Industry Standard, a now defunct magazine for Internet professionals and has been translated into Japanese and Korean. An updated edition, with a new introduction, was published as Unsustainable: How Economic Dogma Is Destroying American Prosperity (Nation Books, 2003).
Fingleton's earliest book, Blindside: Why Japan Is Still on Track to Overtake the U.S. by the Year 2000, was named one of the Ten Best Business Books of 1995 by Business Week. Excerpted in both Foreign Affairs and Fortune, Blindside was published in French and Japanese as well as in several English-language editions and was described as "a good book" by President Bill Clinton in a letter to Senator Fritz Hollings in July of 1995 (click on http://72.167.117.219/pdf/hollings-letter.pdf to view this letter). Blindside showed that, behind a cloak of absurdly exaggerated economic dysfunction, the Japanese economic system in the 1990s quietly surpassed the United States in the most advanced and geopolitically important areas of manufacturing. Fingleton predicted that this would power a sharply contrasting trend in the two nations' trade performances. While Fingleton's argument was for a time ridiculed by those who hadn't read Blindside, his point that Japanese leaders greatly exaggerated Japan's financial problems as a way of diverting American attention from Japan's rising trade surpluses has now become generally accepted by independent experts. Working mainly through cooperative foreign investment analysts in Tokyo, these leaders systematically filled the press with talk of an imminent Japanese economic collapse. Fingleton identified five top-rated analysts - Kenneth Courtis, Robert Feldman, Alexander Kinmont, Jesper Koll, and Peter Tasker - as particularly influential in this initiative and in 1999 invited each of them to debate the "lost decade" story in public. All five refused.
Fingleton maintains that it has become clear in retrospect that the United States, not Japan, had become an economic basket case in the 1990s. He points out that, with less than half the population of the United States, Japan passed the United States in net manufacturing added value during the "lost decade" and in 2007 its exports to China rose to more than twice those of the United States. Between 1989 and 2007, Japan's current account surplus increased nearly fourfold, while America's current account deficit ballooned nearly sevenfold .
Fingleton was born in Ireland in 1948 and won a scholarship to Trinity College Dublin, where he studied economics and mathematics and edited the student newspaper. On graduating in 1970, he joined the Irish Independent, Ireland's largest newspaper, as economics reporter. In 1973, he moved to London and worked first as a reporter for Investors Guardian and later as personal finance editor of the Financial Times. In 1979, he was selected by Sir James Goldsmith to join a "dream team" of top Fleet Street journalists who launched Now! magazine. With Tom Tickell, he co-authored The Penguin Money Book (Penguin Books, 1981). In 1981, he moved to New York as an associate editor for Forbes.
In 1985, Fingleton was posted to Tokyo as East Asia bureau chief for Euromoney. He subse-
quently reported from most of East Asia's major economies and, as a member of a New York Stock Exchange delegation, met China's supreme leader Deng Xiao-ping at Beijing's Great Hall of the People in 1986. He quickly established a reputation for the depth of his understanding of the East Asian economic system and for boldly prescient judgments. Beginning in September 1987 (in an article featured on the cover of Euromoney as "Why the Japanese Banks are Shaky" (to read this article, click on http://72.167.117.219/pdf/euromoney-0987a.pdf ), he issued a series of prescient forecasts of the Japanese banks' debt problems of the early 1990s, the Japanese real estate implosion, and the Tokyo stock market crash.
Fingleton's commentaries on East Asian economics and business have been published in the Atlantic, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Challenge, The Washington Post, Time, GQ, Technology Review, and New Republic. He has been a contributor to or an interviewee on many broadcast media, including CNBC, CNN, National Public Radio, the BBC, RTE, and Sky News. He has been the featured interviewee on major broadcast programs, most notably the BBC's famous Jimmy Young Show in 1976 and National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation" program in 1999.
Fingleton has interviewed many of the world's most prominent news sources, not just quotable busi-
ness figures such as Rupert Murdoch, Lou Gerstner, Warren Buffett, Sanford Weill, Peter Lynch, and Donald Trump, but fundamental economic thinkers such as Robert Solow, Paul Samuelson, James Tobin, Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek, and C.Northcote Parkinson. His work has been read into the record of the U.S. Senate by Senator Ernest F. Hollings and has been commended by Pat Choate, James Fallows, John Kenneth Galbraith, Ralph Nader, Roger Milliken, Robert Heller, and Chalmers Johnson, among others.
His writing on accounting matters at Forbes won the American accounting profession's 1983 award for excellence in financial writing. He is listed in Marquis Who's Who in the World and has testified before the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission. His authority as one of the West's foremost experts on the East Asian economic system has been acknowledged by the U.S. Business and Industry Council, which in 2001 presented him with its American values award for Blindside and In Praise of Hard Industries.
To attend Eamonn Fingleton's BookNotes presentation, you must purchase a copy of In the Jaws of the Dragon from our shop. Paperback copies of Fingleton's In the Jaws of the Dragon are available for sale at Good Day Books for (¥) each, tax included.
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