Eamonn Fingleton is a Tokyo-based author and economic commentator whose latest book is Unsustainable: How Economic Dogma Is Destroying American Prosperity (Nation Books, 2003).

He is also the author of In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, Is the Key to Future Prosperity. Published by Houghton Mifflin in 1999, this presented an early - and damning - critique of the New Economy and a strong warning about the decline of America's once world-beating advanced manufacturing industries.

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, the now defunct magazine for Internet professionals. It has been translated into Japanese and Korean.

His earlier 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.

A former editor for the Financial Times and Forbes, Fingleton worked successively nine years in London and five in New York before moving to Tokyo in 1985. He is thus one of the few English-language journalists who can claim an in-depth knowledge of all three of the world's major financial capitals. He has reported from most of East Asias major economies and, as a member of a top-level American financial delegation to Beijing, met China's supreme leader Deng Xiaoping in the mid 1980s. His commentaries on Japanese economics and business have been published in The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, the Harvard Business Review, Challenge, The Washington Post, Time, GQ, Technology Review and The New Republic. He has been a contributor to or interviewee on many broadcast media, including CNBC, CNN, National Public Radio, the BBC, RTE, and Sky News. In September 1999, he was the featured interviewee on NPR's Talk of the Nation program.

Known for a series of prescient forecasts issued in Euromoney magazine in the late 1980s, he predicted Japan's real estate crash, the subsequent Tokyo banking crisis, and the long Tokyo stock market slump. In the 1990s he was almost alone among economic commentators in consistently and correctly maintaining that Japan would ride out the strains of both the rising yen and the Tokyo banking crisis without having to abandon its distinctive economic institutions. As he showed in an article he contributed to the November 2002 issue of the London intellectual magazine, Prospect, Japanese officials deliberately exaggerated Japan's economic problems in the 1990s in an effort to stay below Washington's radar on trade. Click here to read "Japan's fake funk: the truth about a nation that won't import."

His books have been commended by, among others, James Fallows, Pat Choate, John Kenneth Galbraith, Ralph Nader, Senator Ernest Hollings, Roger Milliken, President Bill Clinton, Chalmers Johnson, and Robert Heller.

He is currently working on a new book entitled The Sun, the Dragon, and the Sleeping Cowboy: Japan's Secret Understanding with China and the Coming Collapse of American Power.

His writing on accounting matters at Forbes won him the American accounting profession's 1983 award for excellence in financial writing. In June 2001, he received the American Values Award of the U.S. Business & Industry Council for his work on Blindside and In Praise of Hard Industries.

He welcomes e-mail messages and, even more so, snail-mail communications from readers of his writings and tries to offer the courtesy of a reply (or at least an acknowledgment) to all bona fide correspondents. His contact details are: