A stimulating look at the tectonic forces impelling China and America toward a financial earthquake.
China and the United States may be on a collision course provoked by the forces of international finance, according to this study.
Fok, an investment banker and former executive at Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing, surveys the intricate interplay of domestic and international economics, government policy, and intense rivalry that shapes the relationship between a United States that sits atop the global finance system and a China with burgeoning fiscal clout. He examines the “geo-economic warfare” between the two powers. This conflict involves the trade war started by then-President Donald Trump, featuring tariffs, sanctions, and bans on Chinese tech companies; the tensions over China’s huge trade surplus with the U.S.; China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which uses foreign investments and aid to draw other countries into its economic orbit; and military confrontations in the South China Sea. But he probes the deeper structural forces beneath the surface clashes. One is the role of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency, which lets America borrow endlessly from other countries at low interest rates but requires it to run huge balance-of-payments deficits to supply liquidity to the global economy. Meanwhile, the dollar’s structural overvaluation makes U.S. exports and manufacturing uncompetitive. Another factor is China’s investment-led growth model, which causes it to build too much industrial capacity while keeping wages and consumer spending artificially low, exacerbating trade imbalances. And both China and America, the author contends, have followed economic and tax policies that favor wealthy corporate elites. The author’s recommendations include international cooperation in ending the dollar’s position as the global currency and progressive taxes and campaign finance reform in America. China, for its part, could ease off industrial investment, boost wages and consumption, and make governance more transparent.
Fok offers an insightful analysis of the world economy that extracts underlying patterns from the confusion of everyday commerce. He sets it against an intriguing, if meandering, recap of episodes from economic history, covering everything from the Great Recession of 2008 and the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference that launched America to world economic supremacy to the financial governance of medieval Venice and the Ming dynasty’s pullback from maritime exploration in the 15th century. The author makes this potentially dry material colorful and entertaining, with prose that is sophisticated and well informed but also lucid and accessible. His deep knowledge of the Chinese economy and financial system lets him discuss them in detail—“When investors sell their Mainland A-shares, the obligation to deliver back their cash falls on the Hong Kong Securities Clearing Company (HKSCC), a subsidiary of HKEX, which is subject to Hong Kong’s laws and regulations.” But he can also step back for elegant, big-picture perspectives. (“Far from being the last man standing at the end of history, America has arrived at the end of its unipolar moment a hobbled giant. Its finances overstretched, its military exhausted, its infrastructure crumbling, its society divided, and unpopular overseas, it would not be inapt to paraphrase the term used to describe the Ottoman Empire before WW1 and call the US the ‘Sick Man of North America.’ ”) Both finance professionals and lay readers interested in money, history, and geopolitics will find this a captivating, sweeping, and timely read.
A stimulating look at the tectonic forces impelling China and America toward a financial earthquake.Pub Date: Dec. 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-119-86276-5
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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