Jerry M. Rosenberg is Emeritus Professor of International Business at Rutgers University, where he received the university’s Distinguished Faculty Award. His writing career spans more than six decades and more than thirty books, including two prior works on global recessions that have been translated into Japanese, Russian, Czech and Slovak, Chinese, and Spanish. He holds a PhD from New York University, an MA from Ohio State University, a certificate from the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris, and a BS from the City College of New York.
The New York Times has called Rosenberg “arguably the leading business and technical lexicographer in the nation,” a reputation built across decades of reference works, including The Essential Dictionary of International Trade and the Dictionary of Business and Management, alongside narrative titles like Inside the Wall Street Journal and The Concise Encyclopedia of the Great Recession, 2007–2012. His honors include a Marshall Foundation Fellowship and three Fulbright Awards. He has testified before the U.S. Senate’s Constitutional Rights Subcommittee and addressed audiences at the U.S. State Department.
That combination, a lexicographer’s precision and a historian’s long view of recessions, is what Rosenberg brings to tariff policy and economic history now. Few writers working today have chronicled as many downturns from as close a vantage point, and fewer still have spent a career defining the terms the rest of the financial press borrows.
His new book, An Autocrat’s Playbook: Trump’s Tariffs and the Road to Economic Chaos, applies that expertise to the current moment. Rosenberg traces a century of trade policy from the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 through the Great Recession and COVID-19 to today’s tariff escalation, and follows the legal fight over who actually has the constitutional authority to tax the world’s imports: Congress, or the president acting alone. The book is documentary and historically grounded rather than a partisan broadside, examining recession mechanics, the response from U.S. allies and rivals, and the statutory maneuvering that followed the Supreme Court’s ruling against the administration’s tariff authority.
“Whatever else defines this term, tariffs are the administration’s central economic weapon,” Rosenberg writes, “and the costs are already showing up in prices, markets, and alliances.”
An Autocrat’s Playbook is published by Riot House Publishing, an independent Los Angeles press for nonfiction writers with something real to say about power and the institutions that wield it. Rosenberg lives in Massachusetts.