Who is Eamonn Fingleton

Eamonn Fingleton, an Irish ex-pat who resides in Tokyo, is one of the most original and insightful economic thinkers of our age. He has continually bucked the conventional wisdom on Globalism, the "new economy" and America's wanton abandonment of it's manufacturing sector. His predictions on how and why Washington's misguided economic policies are speeding its decline and the power shift from the U.S. to the East Asia have proven correct time and time again.

And yet, nobody listens to him. He is reporting on the most momentous story of the last 500 years: the power shift from America to the Confucian nations of Japan and China, but he is the unlucky bearer of unpalatable truths. For the most part, Western policy makers and journalists have responded to his critique by putting their fingers in their ears and loudly proclaiming, "La, la, la, la, la."

If they had instead heeded his 2003 book, Unsustainable: How Economic Dogma is Destroying American Prosperity, perhaps we wouldn't be in the serious straits we find ourselves in now. This prescient book is an expansion of an earlier work, In Praise Of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not The New Economy, Is The Key To Future Prosperity, written in 1999. Here is an excerpt from the book:

"The most dispiriting aspect of the events of the last four years has been the way the American establishment has chosen to ignore the deeper meaning of the stock market debacle. American opinion makers have missed something that will be obvious to future historians -- that the absurd overvaluation of New Economy stocks in the late 1990s was no isolated mishap. Rather it was part of a much larger pattern of American economic self-delusion. Another important manifestation of that self-delusion is the equanimity with which the United States has viewed the decline of its manufacturing industries in recent decades. Like the New Age talk that propelled the dot.com debacle, the American establishment's indifference to the plight of American manufacturing industries is based on no rigorous analysis. The key commonality between the two cases is an a priori belief that whatever the market dictates is, in all circumstances, unquestionably right."