This was a major theme of his 1995 book "Blindside: Why Japan Is Still on Track to Overtake the US by the Year 2000". It was named one of the Ten Best Business Books of 1995 by "BusinessWeek". In 2012, he wrote an article for "The New York Times Sunday Review" called "The Myth of Japan's Failure" which updated his view that Japan has continued to best the United States all through the "lost decade". The article drew wide commentary. His second US-published 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 that China is not converging to Western values but rather is following the Confucian econo-political model pioneered by Japan and characterised by aggressive mercantilism as well as a state-directed economy. Two days before the United States and Britain went to war in Iraq in 2003, he published an op-ed article arguing that the peaceful course of the American occupation of Japan in the late 1940s would not be replicated in post-war Iraq. As a member of a US financial delegation led by New York Stock Exchange chairman John J. Phelan, he met Deng Xiaoping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in 1986. He has repeatedly challenged intellectual opponents to a public debate on the Japanese economy. In the case of two of his most prominent opponents, he offered to make a $10,000 donation to a good cause of their choice if either was prepared to join him for a public discussion. The offer was not taken up. Fingleton's analysis of East Asian economics is founded on a counterintuitive concept called suppressed consumption. He holds that by suppressing consumption, a government can powerfully boost a nation's savings rate. In an address to the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in 2008, he stated: "The resulting huge flows of capital are... channeled via state controlled banks towards those corporations deemed most likely to make effective use of the money in boosting productivity." "How is consumption suppressed? The most obvious method is via tight controls on consumer credit. Less obviously the economy is regulated to make it physically difficult for consumers to consume (for instance, by severely limiting access to imported luxuries and by tightly restricting the supply of housing space). Sometimes the resulting savings arise in the hands of consumers. In many cases, however, they accrue to corporations in the form of super-high retained profits.