Kenneth Rogoff’s Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider’s View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead has been an extraordinarily timely and insightful read for me this month. The book was written before the 2024 election and published in 2025, and it reflects Rogoff’s experience as the Maurits C. Boas Chair of International Economics at Harvard and as a former chief economist at the IMF.

I chose to read How Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace by Michael Pettis and Matthew C. Klein to better understand why tariffs often fail to resolve trade imbalances. Pettis and Klein offer a compelling argument that modern trade conflicts are rooted less in national competition and more in domestic inequality. Their central thesis is that income inequality within countries, especially surplus nations, leads to global trade tensions.