Quotes from Raghuram G. Rajan

Autobiographies are always written as if the author had it all mapped out with perfect foresight, ignoring the risks and uncertainties at that time. This misleads, as much as those beautiful photographs of a past holiday abstract from the heat, the mosquitoes, and the lack of connectivity. Policy making invariably involves taking measured risks in the face of uncertainty, for one has neither a prior template nor the luxury of indecision.

Why are poorer developing countries like China financing the unsustainable consumption of rich countries like the United States?

These strongly Aristotelian attitudes, which still dominate many societies today, reflected a suspicion of the middleman. They were thought to make money not by adding intrinsic value to the traded item, but by moving goods or money to areas of shortage, or even, many believed, by creating the shortage in the first place.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan once quipped "If you want to build a great city, create a great university and wait 200 years."11

This is a convenient focus, because the villains are easily identified and measures can be taken against malfeasance and neglect. What's more, it absolves the rest of us of our responsibility for precipitating this crisis. But this is too facile a response.

As economist Alan Blinder has argued, all impersonal services that can be delivered electronically at a distance, with little or no degradation in quality, are potentially vulnerable.16 What will be harder to replace are human creativity, customization, and human empathy.

easy credit has been used as a palliative throughout history by governments that are unable to address the deeper anxieties of the middle class directly