Scary Book of the Week

It’s hard to know what aspect of this book (extracted in Der Spiegel) is the scariest: the mercantilist assumption of a ‘world war for wealth,’ arguing for a multilateral US-EU FTA as an economic NATO against a bizarre caricature of the East, or the fact that the ‘best-selling’ author was ‘Economic Writer of the Year’ in 2004.  Then there are laugh-out-loud statements like this:

The EU Commissioners are the last true believers in the religion of free trade.

It does serve to illustrate that mercantilist thinking is extremely resilient, not least in Europe, and that arguments for free trade are never entirely won.