Born in Ireland in 1948, he graduated from Trinity College, Dublin in 1970 earning a degree in economics, mathematics, and English. He worked in Dublin, London, New York, and Tokyo as a financial journalist before becoming a full-time author in 1991. His first wife, the British journalist and cookery writer Mary McCutchan and their twin babies Tara and Andrew died in a car accident in London in 1974. In 1988 he married Japanese businesswoman Yasuko Amako whose Tokyo-based mail order distribution company specializes in importing European and American luxury goods.

He is best known for his analyses since the mid 1980s of the Japanese business, financial, and manufacturing system, but he has often applied lessons from Japan's experience to US, European, and other policy questions. In his capacity as deputy editor of the international banking magazine Euromoney in the late 1980s, he outspokenly questioned the sustainability of Japan's then super-high land and stock values. His first such commentary was published in September 1987 under the cover heading "Why Japanese Banks are Shaky." [1] He was one of the earliest critics of financialization and one of his key arguments is that there is no substitute for advanced manufacturing industries...by which he means highly capital-intensive, knowhow-intensive industries typically making capital equipment, new materials, and leading edge components...as the main pillar of any advanced economy. He suggests that the United States made a catastrophic mistake in the 1990s in allowing leadership in such industries to pass to Japan. That was a major theme of his 1995 book Blindside: Why Japan Is Still on Track to Overtake the U.S. by the Year 2000. It was named one of the Ten Best Business Books of 1995 by BusinessWeek. 12/18/95 THE BEST BUSINESS BOOKS OF 1995

His second book In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, Is the Key to Future Prosperity published in 1999, took a contrarian stance on the New Economy.

His most recent book In the Jaws of the Dragon argues thatrather than America changing China, China is changing America. Chinais not converging to Western values but rather is following theConfucian econo-political model pioneered by Japan and characterizedby aggressive mercantilism as well as a state-directed economy.

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

Two days before the United States and Britain went to war in Iraq in 2003, he published an op-ed article in the International Herald Tribune arguing that the peaceful course of the American occupation of Japanin the late 1940s would not be replicated in post-war Iraq. MEANWHILE : For a vision of Iraq, the Japan model fails - International Herald Tribune