“Taggart advises the Board on the macro-historical context of the market. He helps our members distinguish between temporary trends and permanent structural realities.”
R. Taggart Murphy
Author, Japan and the Shackles of the Past
Professor Emeritus, University of Tsukuba
Former Non-Resident Senior Fellow, Brookings InstitutionR. Taggart Murphy provides the intellectual scaffolding necessary to understand the modern Japanese state. A renowned scholar and author, his work dissects the deep historical and structural forces that govern Japan’s political economy—forces that often remain invisible to the casual observer.
His seminal book, Japan and the Shackles of the Past, is widely regarded as an essential text for understanding the institutional constraints on Japanese policy. Before his tenure as Professor of International Political Economy at the University of Tsukuba, Taggart spent decades in the financial trenches as an investment banker with Chase Manhattan and Goldman Sachs in Tokyo. This rare duality—practitioner and academic—allows him to analyze economic trends not just as data points, but as the outcomes of specific political and historical choices.
A former Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, Taggart’s analysis offers a necessary counterweight to the often superficial narratives of the global business press.