Eamonn Fingleton is an Irish-born financial journalist who has held senior positions in Dublin, London, New York, and Tokyo.

He is best known for his 1995 book Blindside, which showed that in persisting with free trade, the United States was courting economic disaster. The book’s analysis is now considered prescient.

The book moreover resolved many of the mysteries of East Asian economics. In particular it answered a key question: why have East Asian nations done so well? After all, for generations they have been steadily increasing their global market share yet they have pursued policies that seem to flout all capitalist ideas of good economics. Examples of such policies include lifetime employment, cartels, trade barriers, and ubiquitous regulation. Even Japan, all through its so-called lost decade of the 1990s, continued to increase its global market share at a remarkable pace.

A key to Fingleton’s analysis is that policymakers have greatly underestimated the importance of advanced manufacturing. Such manufacturing is typically both highly capital-intensive and highly knowhow-intensive. The United States dominated such manufacturing until as recently as the 1970s but thereafter Japan, and, to a lesser extent, Korea, Taiwan and Germany, have taken over. Advanced manufacturing is easy to overlook because it is largely invisible to consumers. Seemingly almost everything these days is made in China. What consumers miss is that Chinese manufacturers depend on more advanced foreign manufacturers for most such goods. Known as intermediate goods, such goods include highly purified materials, super-miniaturized components, and ever more precise production machinery. Typically the supply of such goods these days is dominated by Japan and Germany.

As Blindside documented, free trade has become more and more counterproductive. The United States and the United Kingdom have suffered particularly from their faith in free trade. (The story is more complicated in the case of smaller nations.) As Fingleton pointed out, a key problem with the standard theoretical case for free trade is that it ignores depreciation. This may seem like an arcane point and it goes almost entirely unnoticed in mainstream economic discussions. Yet depreciation rates have soared in the last two centuries. The net effect has been greatly to increase the rewards to nations that cheat on promises to open up to free trade.

Born in 1948, Fingleton studied economics, mathematics, and English at Trinity College Dublin. On graduation in 1970, he was hired by the Irish Independent as economics correspondent. He moved to London in 1972, and worked for several major British publications including the Sun, the Financial Times, and Now! magazine.

Now! was a short-lived magazine founded by the Anglo-French financier Sir James Goldsmith. His much-trumpeted agenda was to employ exclusively Britain’s best journalists and pay them accordingly .

It didn’t work. On Now!’s demise in 1979, Fingleton moved to New York as an editor for Forbes magazine. His work there won an award from the American accounting profession.

In 1986, he moved to Tokyo as East Asia editor for Euromoney, a London-based investment banking magazine. His brief was to find out how Japan’s famously “enigmatic” economic system really worked. Besides Blindside, his books have included In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, is the Key to Future Prosperity (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999) and In the Jaws of the Dragon: America’s Fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Hegemony (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2009).

Fingleton’s work has been widely endorsed by such experts as James Fallow, Pat Choate, and the late Harvard professor John Kenneth Galbraith. Galbraith’s endorsement was especially significant as he had long been notorious for never endorsing other people’s work. His exception for Fingleton’s work was all the more significant for the fact that he ranked as probably America’s greatest expert on the Japanese economy. He had in his youth served as the chief economic adviser to General Douglas MacArthur in the latter’s efforts to reform Japan after World War II.

Among other key opinion leaders who endorsed Blindside was Senator Ernest F. Hollings. As chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, Hollings had long ranked as one of America’s greatest experts on East Asian economics. He sent copies to many friends and allies. One recipient was the then sitting President Bill Clinton, who in a “thank you” note pronounced Blindside “a good book.” The book went on to be named by Business Week magazine one of the ten best books of the year.

Among other key opinion leaders who endorsed Blindside was Senator Ernest F. Hollings. As chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, Hollings had long ranked as one of America’s greatest experts on East Asian economics. He sent copies of the book to many friends and allies in Washington. One recipient was the then sitting President Bill Clinton, who said in a “thank you” note that it was “a good book.”

Fingleton’s first wife was Mary McCutchan, whom he met in 1968 at Trinity College Dublin. They married in 1970.

Mary and their children Tara and Andrew died in a car accident in London in 1974. He married his second wife, Yasuko Amako, in 1987. Fingleton and Amako parted in 2012 when he decided to leave Japan.

These days he divides his time between Dublin and Donegal. His constant companion is a saluki called Cassandra.