Eamonn Fingleton

Infobox Person
name = Eamonn Fingleton

---

caption =
birth_name = Eamonn Fingleton
birth_date = birthdate and age|1948|8|19
birth_place =
death_date =
death_place =
other_names =
nationality = Irish flagicon|Ireland
known_for = Japan revisionism
spouse = Yasuka
occupation = Journalist
website = [http://unsustainable.org/ Official website]

Eamonn Fingleton (b. 19 August 1948) is an Irish journalist and author. His books, written for a general audience, deal with global economics and globalism. A former editor for the "Financial Times" and "Forbes", he has written on East Asian and global issues for the "The Atlantic Magazine", "The New York Times", "The Washington Post", and "The Harvard Business Review".

Biography

Born in Ireland in 1948, he graduated from Trinity College, Dublin in 1970 earning a degree in economics, mathematics, and English. He worked in Dublin, London, New York, and Tokyo as a financial journalist before becoming a full-time author in 1991. His first wife, the British journalist and cookery writer Mary McCutchan and their twin babies Tara and Andrew died in a car accident in London in 1974.

Career

He is best known for his analyses since the mid 1980s of the Japanese business, financial, and manufacturing system, but he has often applied lessons from Japan's experience to US, European, and other policy questions. In his capacity as deputy editor of the international banking magazine Euromoney in the late 1980s, he outspokenly questioned the sustainability of Japan's then super-high land and stock values. His first such commentary was published in September 1987 under the cover heading "Why Japanese Banks are Shaky."Or|date=July 2008 [http://72.167.117.219/pdf/euromoney-0987a.pdf] He was one of the earliest critics of financialization and one of his key arguments is that there is no substitute for advanced manufacturing industries -- by which he means highly capital-intensive, knowhow-intensive industries typically making capital equipment, new materials, and leading edge components -- as the main pillar of any advanced economy.Or|date=July 2008 He suggests that the United States made a catastrophic mistake in the 1990s in allowing leadership in such industries to pass to Japan. That was a major theme of his 1995 book Blindside: Why Japan Is Still on Track to Overtake the U.S. by the Year 2000. It was named one of the Ten Best Business Books of 1995 by "BusinessWeek". [ [http://www.businessweek.com/1995/51/b345529.htm 12/18/95 THE BEST BUSINESS BOOKS OF 1995 ] ]

His second book "In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, Is the Key to Future Prosperity" published in 1999, took a contrarian stance on the New Economy.

His most recent book "In the Jaws of the Dragon", his first concerning China, argues that rather than converging on Western values, the Communist state will remain authoritarian and mercantilist. [http://www.holtzbrinckpublishers.com/stmartins/search/SearchBookDisplay.asp?BookKey=4806659]

His books have been praised by James Fallows, Pat Choate, John Kenneth Galbraith, Ralph Nader, Senator Ernest Hollings, Roger Milliken, former President Bill Clinton, Chalmers Johnson and Robert Heller.Fact|date=May 2008

One day after the United States and Britain went to war in Iraq in 2003, he published an op-ed article in the International Herald Tribune arguing, based on the experience of the U.S. occupation of Japan, that trouble lay ahead for the Western occupiers of Iraq. [ [http://www.iht.com/articles/2003/03/18/a9_11.php MEANWHILE : For a vision of Iraq, the Japan model fails - International Herald Tribune ] ]

Books

*"In the Jaws of the Dragon: America's Fate in an Era of Chinese Hegemony" (2008). St. Martin's Press/Thomas Dunne Books. ISBN 0-312-36232-3
*"In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, Is the Key to Future Prosperity" (1999). Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-89968-0
*"Blindside: Why Japan Is Still on Track to Overtake the U.S. By the Year 2000" (1995). Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-63316-8

External links

* [http://unsustainable.org/ Official website] .

References