For most of his career, Wolf was globalization's most articulate advocate. His 2004 book, Why Globalization Works, was a deliberate piece of persuasion - a case made to win, not a neutral survey. He believed open markets and private capital would lift the world, and he wrote that belief into hundreds of columns read by the people who set policy.
Then the 2008 financial crisis arrived, and the machinery he had championed seized up in front of him. Wolf did not bury the disagreement in footnotes. He reconsidered out loud. His confidence in an economy run by the private sector cracked, and his thinking drifted back toward the Keynesian ideas he had absorbed as a young man at Oxford.
He remains a pragmatist with no permanent loyalty to a single school. That is the point. He follows the evidence where it goes and reports the new coordinates, even when they contradict the old ones. Lawrence Summers calls him "the world's preeminent financial journalist." Paul Krugman noted the more uncomfortable fact: Wolf has no PhD, and it has never slowed him down, because "what he has is keen observation and an open mind."
His latest and, by his own account, hardest book is The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (2023). It took five summers. The thesis is blunt: the marriage between democracy and the market economy is failing economically, and because it is failing economically, it is failing politically. His prescription is equally blunt. Fix capitalism, or watch authoritarianism move into the space democracy leaves behind.