11-20-2005, 02:35 AM
Eamonn Fingleton's Record: Thirty Years of Prescience.
by Eamonn Fingleton
7/21/2005
I am preparing a proposal for a new book and, on my agent's suggestion, I will include a retrospective on my record in world watching. Below is a draft of that retrospective.
Eamonn Fingleton,
Tokyo, July 2005.
After more than thirty years reporting from London, New York, and Tokyo, Eamonn Fingleton has few rivals in the range and depth of his economic commentaries. He has met everyone from Henry Kissinger to Deng Xiaoping and has interviewed many of the world's most prominent news sources -- not just quotable business figures like Rupert Murdoch, Lou Gerstner, Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch, and Donald Trump but fundamental economic thinkers like Robert Solow, Paul Samuelson, James Tobin, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich von Hayek. His books have been praised by Pat Choate, Senator Ernest Hollings, Sir James Goldsmith, and Bill Clinton and have been named among the best business books of the year by Business Week and Amazon.com. His prescience has been vindicated on everything from the Tokyo financial crash (which he vociferously predicted in articles in the late 1980s) to the current American quagmire in Iraq (which he foreshadowed in an op-ed article in March 2003). Described by James Fallows as a "bravely original minded writer," Fingleton is fearless in exposing the cant, wishful thinking, and sheer propaganda that too often pervades the English-speaking press.
Here, in reverse chronological order, is a retrospective on some of his bolder insights:
On Alan Greenspan
In the introduction to Unsustainable, a book he published in 2003, Fingleton spotlighted Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan's failure to sound the alarm about America's mounting trade problems. Suggesting that Greenspan risked ruining his legacy over the trade issue, Fingleton wrote: "Where trade is concerned, Greenspan and his officials have been almost entirely silent." Within a few months, Greenspan hinted he might abandon his long-held view -- then almost universally shared in Washington -- that America's trade deficits did not matter. In November 2004 Greenspan made world headlines when, in a tone reminiscent of Emperor Hirohito's admission that "the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage," he characterized the deteriorating trade trend as a "problem."
On the Iraq war
In the run-up to the Iraq war of 2003, Fingleton pronounced the Bush administration's strategy "badly misconstrued" and, almost alone among Tokyo-based commentators, ridiculed the then consensus that a defeated Iraq would play out like Japan at the end of World War II. In an editorial page article in the International Herald Tribune (March 18, 2003), he added: "The trouble with the Japanese precedent is that few of the conditions which made it possible apply to Iraq. Even in defeat Japan was an orderly nation; the same is unlikely to be true of a conquered Iraq⦠Japan played the role of model prisoner, gracefully putting up with many indignities the sooner to regain freedom. For people to behave like this requires a sense of far-sighted discipline that few nations have shown in defeat. Yet post-war Iraq will lack even the most basic decision-making structures necessary to enforce such discipline."
On the New Economy
In his book In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, Is the Key to Future Prosperity (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), Fingleton exposed the logical flaws on which America's dot.com boom was based. Early reviewers, writing in the fall of 1999, found his analysis "far-fetched" and for a while he had few intellectual allies (albeit, including as they did such opinion leaders as Warren Buffett, Rupert Murdoch, Ernest Hollings, and Julian Robertson, they made up in reputation what they lacked in numbers). The book went on to be named one of the ten best business books of 1999 by Amazon.com. It received this cover comment from James Fallows: "His [Fingleton's] skeptical look at the software/Internet boom is important while the boom is going on and will seem even more intriguing once it is over." Months later -- in March 2000 -- the dot.com bubble began to implode and millions of unwary savers were caught in the subsequent crash.
On U.S. Software Jobs
Fingleton was early to spot the devastating threat that cheap foreign labor posed to American software jobs. Citing the rise of the Indian software industry in a commentary in 1995, he debunked the then widely held view that Americans enjoyed a unique cultural edge in software. He added: "Increasingly America's software workers are pitted in head-to-head wage competition with workers in other countries.â¦. Software know-how migrates quickly around the world via textbooks and journals, not to mention the reverse engineering of innovative products. Virtually the only thing needed to create software is brainwork. And these days brainwork is a commodity that can be sourced anywhere there are modems and telephone lines."
On Japan's War Legacy
Fingleton broke new journalistic ground when in 1995 he directly contrasted how Japan and Germany had dealt with their respective World War II legacies. As he pointed out in Blindside (p. 122 and pp. 365-366), Japan had paid a mere $1 billion to victims of its war crimes -- a pittance compared to Germany's $72 billion. Fingleton's disclosure defied a general pattern of "self-censorship" on the compensation issue in Tokyo. As far as the government-controlled Japan Times was concerned, whenever the topic of Japan's war guilt came up, reporters were expected to focus narrowly on the semantics of Japan's apologies, while steering clear of the compensation issue (for fear of provoking class-action suits from American lawyers). The semantics-only approach was also followed -- generally unwittingly -- by Western correspondents in Tokyo. It is interesting to note that in 1994 Ian Buruma, a prominent Anglo-Dutch intellectual (and formerJapan Times reporter), published an entire book devoted to coparing and contrasting Japanese and German war guilt without ever mentioning the sharp divergence in compensation policies. Fingleton's initiative was followed quickly by Iris Chang who highlighted the compensation issue in her book The Rape of Nanking and thereby precipitated a flood of class actions in California. Only then did the Tokyo authorities relax their "semantics-only" editorial guidelines.
All this had a sequel when Fingleton as well as Chang, who died in a reported suicide in 2004, were targeted in an Internet-based effort to discredit their work. Ostensibly espousing their work (and giving the impression it was operated by a close associate of Fingleton's), a racist website entitled East of the Rising Sun purported to link them to anti-Japanese hatred. The site was bogus and its owner proved untraceable.
On the Japanese Economic System
Beginning in the late 1980s, Japan's public relations spokesmen began proclaiming "the end of Japan Inc." Japan was supposedly opening up to free trade and would therefore be forced to abandon such hallowed economic institutions as permanent employment, the so-called keiretsu system, cartelization of production and marketing, and minute bureaucratic control of almost every aspect of Japanese life. Led by The Economist magazine and the Wall Street Journal, the Western media took the bait. Fingleton was almost alone in rejecting the story. In his 1995 book Blindside, he showed that far from being "dysfunctional cultural remnants," Japan's distinctive economic institutions worked together in highly counterintuitive (and never before explained) ways to further the central objective of Japanese economic policy: the domination of the world's most advanced manufacturing industries. Ridiculing the conventional view of a "Westernizing Japan," he argued that Japan's special economic institutions would triumphantly survive the financial strains of the 1990s. They did. Essentially as of 2005 the Japanese economic system worked as it did when Fingleton arrived in Tokyo twenty years earlier.
On Japan's Trade Surpluses
Fingleton has consistently opposed the long-held conventional wisdom that Japan's trade surpluses are destined inevitably to decline. He first made the case in The Atlantic monthly, where he argued in 1989 that earning large and rising surpluses was central to Japanese policy-making. This was the same year that the writer Bill Emmott premised a whole book on the opposite view -- he argued that Japan's trade surpluses were destined soon not only to decline but to disappear. Referring to the most comprehensive measure of a nation's trade, Emmott commented: "The [Japan's] current account is moving more rapidly towards balance than anybody realizes⦠Japan's capital surplus has already passed its peak. It is destined to last at best for another decade, to 2000; more likely it will be gone soon after 1995." The evidence is now in. Japan's current account surplus in 2004 came to $181 billion. That was up more than three-fold from $57 billion in 1989 (which happened to be the peak year of American concern about Japan's "juggernaut" trade policies).
On U.S.-Japan Economic Rivalry
Since the late 1980s Fingleton has consistently warned that a key aim of Japanese industrial policy has been to hollow out America's most advanced industries. He went on in the early 1990s to challenge the then widely held opinion that a suddenly resurgent America had "turned the tables" on a supposedly struggling Japan. In Blindside in 1995 he showed that Japan was continuing to capture ever more "chokepoints" in key high-tech materials, components, and capital equipment -- and as a result was establishing dominance over an ever-widening swathe of advanced manufacturing. And advanced manufacturing, he showed, was the key to global economic leadership. The evidence of latest trade figures clinches Fingleton's case: between 1989 and 2004 -- a time when, as already noted, Japan's current account surpluses tripled -- America's current account deficits increased six-fold. The contrasting trade trends reflect a huge migration of advanced manufacturing from the United States to Japan -- a shift that was one of Blindside's central predictions.
But what of the Japanese yen, which Fingleton argued would more than double against the dollar during the 1990s (this was the basis for Blindside's subtitle, Why Japan Is Still on Track To Overtake the U.S. By the Year 2000)? In the event the yen's rise -- at a mere 40 percent -- was far less than Fingleton expected (though even this modest rise represented a powerful rebuke to his opponents, who by the mid-1990s had written Japan off as a "basket case"). The yen's shortfall is not vindication denied, he says, but merely vindication postponed. What threw off his prediction was that, in defiance of all concern for the American economy's long-term health, the Clinton administration suddenly switched to a high-dollar policy in 1995 (just as Blindside was published in fact). This provided a strong short-term boost to America's trade position, by immediately reducing the dollar-denominated cost of American imports. But as the subsequent trade trend has made clear the long-term effect has been to condemn America's remaining manufacturers to a slow death.
In standing by Blindside's subtitle, Fingleton argues that, absent massive intervention by the central banks of Japan, China, and other East Asian nations, the dollar would long ago have collapsed. While Japan and China could easily survive and indeed thrive with a dollar at half its early-2005 level, the problem lies on the American side. As Clyde Prestowitz has documented in a 2005 book, a deeply hollowed out United States has lost virtually all import-substitution capacity -- thus in the short and medium terms a collapse in the dollar would have the perverse effect of greatly exacerbating America's current account deficits. Of course, dollar support efforts not only hasten the ultimate implosion of American power but in the meantime hide from the American people how disastrously the United States has already been weakened.
Basket case note: America's current account deficit in 2004 equalled nearly 6 percent of national output. The only case of a major nation exceeding this level was Italy in 1924. In January 1925, Benito Mussolini seized dictatorial powers in Rome.
On the Japanese Trade Lobby
In a major investigation for a New York-based publisher, Fingleton in 1989 showed that world-renowned McKinsey consultant Kenichi Ohmae had systematically misled American officials, executives, and journalists over many years about the nature of Japanese trade policies. Ohmae's career never recovered and he was eventually "let go" by his embarrassed McKinsey partners. Once so prominent in the trade debate that he was described as Japan's most famous citizen, Ohmae has long since virtually disappeared from view.
It is interesting to recall that in 1989 Ohmae argued that the Japanese market was as open as that of the United States. The truth was officially admitted only years later when, in a devastating gaffe at the Tokyo press club, Mitsubishi Corporation president Minoru Makihara referred to the Japanese market of the late 1980s as "closed and tightly protected."
On the Tokyo Crash
Reporting from Tokyo in the late 1980s, Fingleton was one of a tiny minority of observers who warned consistently and clearly of the coming Japanese financial crash. His concerns were first aired in Euromoney magazine in September 1987. In a six-page article he showed that Japanese banks were lending heavily to a highly inflated real estate market. The analysis was billed on Euromoney's cover with the title: "Why the Japanese Banks are Shaky." In the February 1989 issue of the same magazine he made his first prediction of the coming Tokyo stock market crash. He wrote: "After the current tax-driven boom ends in April, Tokyo stock market volume will slump -- and a prolonged bear market, starting probably in the next six months, will make the woes worse." The bear market took longer than expected to arrive -- about four months longer -- but it was to prove more ferocious and prolonged than even Fingleton had expected.
On American Accounting Standards
In 1983 Fingleton highlighted an accounting loophole that enabled many American software companies to inflate their reported profits. He showed how instead of expensing software development, companies misleadingly treated it as a capital investment. Fingleton argued that software development costs should be treated as a form of R & D -- a change that would require deduction in full against current profits. His analysis, published in Forbes magazine, was named the best accounting article of the year by the American accounting profession. The profession subsequently tightened U.S. accounting rules to eliminate the abuse.
On the American Newspaper Market
In 1982 Fingleton challenged the almost universally held view among American media professionals that the Gannett group's plans for a U.S. national newspaper were misguided. Writing in Forbes, Fingleton argued that Gannett's embrace of new technology would likely ensure success where a technologically less sophisticated previous venture had failed. The new newspaper duly caught on -- so much so that it is now America's biggest selling daily. Its name: USA Today.
On the American Television Industry
In a profile of Rupert Murdoch in Forbes magazine in 1981, Fingleton broke the news that Murdoch's Sydney-based company was considering entering satellite broadcasting in the United States. Murdoch duly pressed ahead. The resulting business is now a household name: Fox Broadcasting.
On the British Mortgage Cartel
As City editor of The Sun newspaper in London in the mid 1970s, Fingleton shocked the British establishment by baldly describing Britain's building societies (which are the British version of home mortgage banks) as a cartel. In a pioneering investigation, he showed that the nominally non-profit societies were reaping large profits from their industry-wide "agreement" on interest rates -- and were ploughing these profits into bloated branch networks and unnecessary advertising. Fingleton's campaign was endorsed by the politically influential Institute of Economic Affairs in 1979 and the cartel was broken up in the early 1980s.
Eamonn Fingleton is the author most recently ofUnsustainable: How Economic Dogma Is Destroying American Prosperity (Nation Books, 2003).
http://www.unsustainable.org/view_art_un.asp?Prod_ID=2
by Eamonn Fingleton
7/21/2005
I am preparing a proposal for a new book and, on my agent's suggestion, I will include a retrospective on my record in world watching. Below is a draft of that retrospective.
Eamonn Fingleton,
Tokyo, July 2005.
After more than thirty years reporting from London, New York, and Tokyo, Eamonn Fingleton has few rivals in the range and depth of his economic commentaries. He has met everyone from Henry Kissinger to Deng Xiaoping and has interviewed many of the world's most prominent news sources -- not just quotable business figures like Rupert Murdoch, Lou Gerstner, Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch, and Donald Trump but fundamental economic thinkers like Robert Solow, Paul Samuelson, James Tobin, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich von Hayek. His books have been praised by Pat Choate, Senator Ernest Hollings, Sir James Goldsmith, and Bill Clinton and have been named among the best business books of the year by Business Week and Amazon.com. His prescience has been vindicated on everything from the Tokyo financial crash (which he vociferously predicted in articles in the late 1980s) to the current American quagmire in Iraq (which he foreshadowed in an op-ed article in March 2003). Described by James Fallows as a "bravely original minded writer," Fingleton is fearless in exposing the cant, wishful thinking, and sheer propaganda that too often pervades the English-speaking press.
Here, in reverse chronological order, is a retrospective on some of his bolder insights:
On Alan Greenspan
In the introduction to Unsustainable, a book he published in 2003, Fingleton spotlighted Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan's failure to sound the alarm about America's mounting trade problems. Suggesting that Greenspan risked ruining his legacy over the trade issue, Fingleton wrote: "Where trade is concerned, Greenspan and his officials have been almost entirely silent." Within a few months, Greenspan hinted he might abandon his long-held view -- then almost universally shared in Washington -- that America's trade deficits did not matter. In November 2004 Greenspan made world headlines when, in a tone reminiscent of Emperor Hirohito's admission that "the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage," he characterized the deteriorating trade trend as a "problem."
On the Iraq war
In the run-up to the Iraq war of 2003, Fingleton pronounced the Bush administration's strategy "badly misconstrued" and, almost alone among Tokyo-based commentators, ridiculed the then consensus that a defeated Iraq would play out like Japan at the end of World War II. In an editorial page article in the International Herald Tribune (March 18, 2003), he added: "The trouble with the Japanese precedent is that few of the conditions which made it possible apply to Iraq. Even in defeat Japan was an orderly nation; the same is unlikely to be true of a conquered Iraq⦠Japan played the role of model prisoner, gracefully putting up with many indignities the sooner to regain freedom. For people to behave like this requires a sense of far-sighted discipline that few nations have shown in defeat. Yet post-war Iraq will lack even the most basic decision-making structures necessary to enforce such discipline."
On the New Economy
In his book In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, Is the Key to Future Prosperity (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), Fingleton exposed the logical flaws on which America's dot.com boom was based. Early reviewers, writing in the fall of 1999, found his analysis "far-fetched" and for a while he had few intellectual allies (albeit, including as they did such opinion leaders as Warren Buffett, Rupert Murdoch, Ernest Hollings, and Julian Robertson, they made up in reputation what they lacked in numbers). The book went on to be named one of the ten best business books of 1999 by Amazon.com. It received this cover comment from James Fallows: "His [Fingleton's] skeptical look at the software/Internet boom is important while the boom is going on and will seem even more intriguing once it is over." Months later -- in March 2000 -- the dot.com bubble began to implode and millions of unwary savers were caught in the subsequent crash.
On U.S. Software Jobs
Fingleton was early to spot the devastating threat that cheap foreign labor posed to American software jobs. Citing the rise of the Indian software industry in a commentary in 1995, he debunked the then widely held view that Americans enjoyed a unique cultural edge in software. He added: "Increasingly America's software workers are pitted in head-to-head wage competition with workers in other countries.â¦. Software know-how migrates quickly around the world via textbooks and journals, not to mention the reverse engineering of innovative products. Virtually the only thing needed to create software is brainwork. And these days brainwork is a commodity that can be sourced anywhere there are modems and telephone lines."
On Japan's War Legacy
Fingleton broke new journalistic ground when in 1995 he directly contrasted how Japan and Germany had dealt with their respective World War II legacies. As he pointed out in Blindside (p. 122 and pp. 365-366), Japan had paid a mere $1 billion to victims of its war crimes -- a pittance compared to Germany's $72 billion. Fingleton's disclosure defied a general pattern of "self-censorship" on the compensation issue in Tokyo. As far as the government-controlled Japan Times was concerned, whenever the topic of Japan's war guilt came up, reporters were expected to focus narrowly on the semantics of Japan's apologies, while steering clear of the compensation issue (for fear of provoking class-action suits from American lawyers). The semantics-only approach was also followed -- generally unwittingly -- by Western correspondents in Tokyo. It is interesting to note that in 1994 Ian Buruma, a prominent Anglo-Dutch intellectual (and formerJapan Times reporter), published an entire book devoted to coparing and contrasting Japanese and German war guilt without ever mentioning the sharp divergence in compensation policies. Fingleton's initiative was followed quickly by Iris Chang who highlighted the compensation issue in her book The Rape of Nanking and thereby precipitated a flood of class actions in California. Only then did the Tokyo authorities relax their "semantics-only" editorial guidelines.
All this had a sequel when Fingleton as well as Chang, who died in a reported suicide in 2004, were targeted in an Internet-based effort to discredit their work. Ostensibly espousing their work (and giving the impression it was operated by a close associate of Fingleton's), a racist website entitled East of the Rising Sun purported to link them to anti-Japanese hatred. The site was bogus and its owner proved untraceable.
On the Japanese Economic System
Beginning in the late 1980s, Japan's public relations spokesmen began proclaiming "the end of Japan Inc." Japan was supposedly opening up to free trade and would therefore be forced to abandon such hallowed economic institutions as permanent employment, the so-called keiretsu system, cartelization of production and marketing, and minute bureaucratic control of almost every aspect of Japanese life. Led by The Economist magazine and the Wall Street Journal, the Western media took the bait. Fingleton was almost alone in rejecting the story. In his 1995 book Blindside, he showed that far from being "dysfunctional cultural remnants," Japan's distinctive economic institutions worked together in highly counterintuitive (and never before explained) ways to further the central objective of Japanese economic policy: the domination of the world's most advanced manufacturing industries. Ridiculing the conventional view of a "Westernizing Japan," he argued that Japan's special economic institutions would triumphantly survive the financial strains of the 1990s. They did. Essentially as of 2005 the Japanese economic system worked as it did when Fingleton arrived in Tokyo twenty years earlier.
On Japan's Trade Surpluses
Fingleton has consistently opposed the long-held conventional wisdom that Japan's trade surpluses are destined inevitably to decline. He first made the case in The Atlantic monthly, where he argued in 1989 that earning large and rising surpluses was central to Japanese policy-making. This was the same year that the writer Bill Emmott premised a whole book on the opposite view -- he argued that Japan's trade surpluses were destined soon not only to decline but to disappear. Referring to the most comprehensive measure of a nation's trade, Emmott commented: "The [Japan's] current account is moving more rapidly towards balance than anybody realizes⦠Japan's capital surplus has already passed its peak. It is destined to last at best for another decade, to 2000; more likely it will be gone soon after 1995." The evidence is now in. Japan's current account surplus in 2004 came to $181 billion. That was up more than three-fold from $57 billion in 1989 (which happened to be the peak year of American concern about Japan's "juggernaut" trade policies).
On U.S.-Japan Economic Rivalry
Since the late 1980s Fingleton has consistently warned that a key aim of Japanese industrial policy has been to hollow out America's most advanced industries. He went on in the early 1990s to challenge the then widely held opinion that a suddenly resurgent America had "turned the tables" on a supposedly struggling Japan. In Blindside in 1995 he showed that Japan was continuing to capture ever more "chokepoints" in key high-tech materials, components, and capital equipment -- and as a result was establishing dominance over an ever-widening swathe of advanced manufacturing. And advanced manufacturing, he showed, was the key to global economic leadership. The evidence of latest trade figures clinches Fingleton's case: between 1989 and 2004 -- a time when, as already noted, Japan's current account surpluses tripled -- America's current account deficits increased six-fold. The contrasting trade trends reflect a huge migration of advanced manufacturing from the United States to Japan -- a shift that was one of Blindside's central predictions.
But what of the Japanese yen, which Fingleton argued would more than double against the dollar during the 1990s (this was the basis for Blindside's subtitle, Why Japan Is Still on Track To Overtake the U.S. By the Year 2000)? In the event the yen's rise -- at a mere 40 percent -- was far less than Fingleton expected (though even this modest rise represented a powerful rebuke to his opponents, who by the mid-1990s had written Japan off as a "basket case"). The yen's shortfall is not vindication denied, he says, but merely vindication postponed. What threw off his prediction was that, in defiance of all concern for the American economy's long-term health, the Clinton administration suddenly switched to a high-dollar policy in 1995 (just as Blindside was published in fact). This provided a strong short-term boost to America's trade position, by immediately reducing the dollar-denominated cost of American imports. But as the subsequent trade trend has made clear the long-term effect has been to condemn America's remaining manufacturers to a slow death.
In standing by Blindside's subtitle, Fingleton argues that, absent massive intervention by the central banks of Japan, China, and other East Asian nations, the dollar would long ago have collapsed. While Japan and China could easily survive and indeed thrive with a dollar at half its early-2005 level, the problem lies on the American side. As Clyde Prestowitz has documented in a 2005 book, a deeply hollowed out United States has lost virtually all import-substitution capacity -- thus in the short and medium terms a collapse in the dollar would have the perverse effect of greatly exacerbating America's current account deficits. Of course, dollar support efforts not only hasten the ultimate implosion of American power but in the meantime hide from the American people how disastrously the United States has already been weakened.
Basket case note: America's current account deficit in 2004 equalled nearly 6 percent of national output. The only case of a major nation exceeding this level was Italy in 1924. In January 1925, Benito Mussolini seized dictatorial powers in Rome.
On the Japanese Trade Lobby
In a major investigation for a New York-based publisher, Fingleton in 1989 showed that world-renowned McKinsey consultant Kenichi Ohmae had systematically misled American officials, executives, and journalists over many years about the nature of Japanese trade policies. Ohmae's career never recovered and he was eventually "let go" by his embarrassed McKinsey partners. Once so prominent in the trade debate that he was described as Japan's most famous citizen, Ohmae has long since virtually disappeared from view.
It is interesting to recall that in 1989 Ohmae argued that the Japanese market was as open as that of the United States. The truth was officially admitted only years later when, in a devastating gaffe at the Tokyo press club, Mitsubishi Corporation president Minoru Makihara referred to the Japanese market of the late 1980s as "closed and tightly protected."
On the Tokyo Crash
Reporting from Tokyo in the late 1980s, Fingleton was one of a tiny minority of observers who warned consistently and clearly of the coming Japanese financial crash. His concerns were first aired in Euromoney magazine in September 1987. In a six-page article he showed that Japanese banks were lending heavily to a highly inflated real estate market. The analysis was billed on Euromoney's cover with the title: "Why the Japanese Banks are Shaky." In the February 1989 issue of the same magazine he made his first prediction of the coming Tokyo stock market crash. He wrote: "After the current tax-driven boom ends in April, Tokyo stock market volume will slump -- and a prolonged bear market, starting probably in the next six months, will make the woes worse." The bear market took longer than expected to arrive -- about four months longer -- but it was to prove more ferocious and prolonged than even Fingleton had expected.
On American Accounting Standards
In 1983 Fingleton highlighted an accounting loophole that enabled many American software companies to inflate their reported profits. He showed how instead of expensing software development, companies misleadingly treated it as a capital investment. Fingleton argued that software development costs should be treated as a form of R & D -- a change that would require deduction in full against current profits. His analysis, published in Forbes magazine, was named the best accounting article of the year by the American accounting profession. The profession subsequently tightened U.S. accounting rules to eliminate the abuse.
On the American Newspaper Market
In 1982 Fingleton challenged the almost universally held view among American media professionals that the Gannett group's plans for a U.S. national newspaper were misguided. Writing in Forbes, Fingleton argued that Gannett's embrace of new technology would likely ensure success where a technologically less sophisticated previous venture had failed. The new newspaper duly caught on -- so much so that it is now America's biggest selling daily. Its name: USA Today.
On the American Television Industry
In a profile of Rupert Murdoch in Forbes magazine in 1981, Fingleton broke the news that Murdoch's Sydney-based company was considering entering satellite broadcasting in the United States. Murdoch duly pressed ahead. The resulting business is now a household name: Fox Broadcasting.
On the British Mortgage Cartel
As City editor of The Sun newspaper in London in the mid 1970s, Fingleton shocked the British establishment by baldly describing Britain's building societies (which are the British version of home mortgage banks) as a cartel. In a pioneering investigation, he showed that the nominally non-profit societies were reaping large profits from their industry-wide "agreement" on interest rates -- and were ploughing these profits into bloated branch networks and unnecessary advertising. Fingleton's campaign was endorsed by the politically influential Institute of Economic Affairs in 1979 and the cartel was broken up in the early 1980s.
Eamonn Fingleton is the author most recently ofUnsustainable: How Economic Dogma Is Destroying American Prosperity (Nation Books, 2003).
http://www.unsustainable.org/view_art_un.asp?Prod_ID=2