Insight Ireland Lecture Series - "Does manufacturing matter – Lessons from the financial crisis"
Insight Ireland - Lecture Series 2008/09
Jointly Presented by
Ireland Japan Chamber of Commerce
Temple University Japan
JIC Study Group
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Lecture 3: Friday February 20th 7.30pm – 9pm Temple University - Azabu Hall
Lecture: "Does manufacturing matter – Lessons from the financial crisis."
Speaker: Eamonn Fingleton - Author and former editor for Forbes and Financial Times
Theme: The collapse of America's advanced manufacturing base has played a key role in the present world financial crisis. It is thanks to this decline that the American trade deficits have ballooned out of control in recent years, with the highly destabilizing result that more and more of the world's capital have been sucked into an American financial void.
The mirror opposite of America's performance has been that of Japan, which has now succeeded to America's erstwhile position as the world leader in highly capital-intensive and know-how-intensive manufacturing -- particularly in things that are almost invisible to the consumer (and virtually never noticed in the Western press) such as machine tools, advanced materials, and key components. By no coincidence Japan has become a huge capital exporter -- bigger indeed in real terms than the United States ever was at the zenith of American dominance of the world economy in the 1950s and 1960s.
As a percentage of GDP, America's current account deficits in recent years represent the worst peacetime trade performances of any major nation since Italy in 1924 -- the year before Mussolini seized absolute power. Unlike Italy in 1924, however, America's trade deficits are "baked in" (because America's erstwhile biggest exporters have shut their factories and sold their equipment). In that sense the real comparison is with the final "basket case" years of the Ottoman Empire. If the United States were a company, it would long ago have been declared bankrupt.
Profile: Eamonn Fingleton, a former editor for Forbes and the Financial Times, has been monitoring East Asian economics since he met China's supreme leader Deng Xiaoping in 1986 as a member of a U.S. financial delegation. In Blindside, a controversial 1995 analysis praised by J.K. Galbraith and Bill Clinton, he showed that America was losing its leadership in advanced manufacturing to Japan. His 1999 book, In Praise of Hard Industries, anticipated the American Internet stock crash of 2000. In his 2008 book, In the Jaws of the Dragon, he issues a challenge to the conventional view that China is converging to Western economic and political forms.
Maps are available at http://www.tuj.ac.jp/maps/.
RSVP: Please email secretariat@ijcc.jp
