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
A powerful reiteration of principles—and some fresh ideas—from the longest-serving independent in congressional history.
Another chapter in a long fight against inequality.
Building on his Fighting Oligarchy tour, which this year drew 280,000 people to rallies in red and blue states, Sanders amplifies his enduring campaign for economic fairness. The Vermont senator offers well-timed advice for combating corruption and issues a robust plea for national soul-searching. His argument rests on alarming data on the widening wealth gap’s impact on democracy. Bolstered by a 2010 Supreme Court decision that removed campaign finance limits, “100 billionaire families spent $2.6 billion” on 2024 elections. Sanders focuses on the Trump administration and congressional Republicans, describing their enactment of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” with its $1 trillion in tax breaks for the richest Americans and big social safety net cuts, as the “largest transfer of wealth” in living memory. But as is his custom, he spreads the blame, dinging Democrats for courting wealthy donors while ignoring the “needs and suffering” of the working class. “Trump filled the political vacuum that the Democrats created,” he writes, a resonant diagnosis. Urging readers not to surrender to despair, Sanders offers numerous legislative proposals. These would empower labor unions, cut the workweek to 32 hours, regulate campaign spending, reduce gerrymandering, and automatically register 18-year-olds to vote. Grassroots supporters can help by running for local office, volunteering with a campaign, and asking educators how to help support public schools. Meanwhile, Sanders asks us “to question the fundamental moral values that underlie” a system that enables “the top 1 percent” to “own more wealth than the bottom 93 percent.” Though his prose sometimes reads like a transcribed speech with built-in applause lines, Sanders’ ideas are specific, clear, and commonsensical. And because it echoes previous statements, his call for collective introspection lands as genuine.
A powerful reiteration of principles—and some fresh ideas—from the longest-serving independent in congressional history.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9798217089161
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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