The End of Influence is a short book by Stephen Cohen and Brad DeLong that has been been making news in foreign policy circles. It talks about the fall of neo-liberalism and the rise of neo-mercantilism. I'm not going to blog about a book that I haven't read yet, so here are the thoughts of Matthew Yglesias, who has read the book:

What you really get here is a brilliant short tour of the rise and fall of the neoliberal project on an international basis. They offer what will strike some as an almost laughably uncynical account of the motives behind this project, but that makes the documentation of its ultimate failure all the more compelling. As they lay out, it proved to actually be the case that the only route to sustainable economic development anyone could find involved substantial state-directed export-oriented growth. This, in turn, required the United States to play the role of global importer of last resort. 

The up shot of this is that more and more America doesn’t have “the money” in the world system. And not only is the money in the hands of Asian exporters and oil producers, a very large portion of it is in the hands of sovereign wealth funds. In addition, the Panic of 2008 has left governments in the developed world with large ownership stakes in a variety of firms. As a result, we’re going to have to transition to a very different-looking world economic order—one in which self-conscious government planning is going to play a bigger role, one in which US living standards will decline relative to our major trading partners, and in which American cultural and ideological influence is likely to wane.

An excerpt of the book is available here at FP.com.