Raghuram Rajan was one of the few economists
who warned of the global financial crisis before it hit. Now, as the world struggles to
recover, it's tempting to blame what happened on just a few greedy bankers who took
irrational risks and left the rest of us to foot the bill. In Fault Lines, Rajan argues
that serious flaws in the economy are also to blame, and warns that a potentially more
devastating crisis awaits us if they aren't fixed.
Rajan shows how the individual choices that
collectively brought about the economic meltdown--made by bankers, government officials,
and ordinary homeowners--were rational responses to a flawed global financial order in
which the incentives to take on risk are incredibly out of step with the dangers those
risks pose. He traces the deepening fault lines in a world overly dependent on the
indebted American consumer to power global economic growth and stave off global downturns.
He exposes a system where America's growing inequality and thin social safety net create
tremendous political pressure to encourage easy credit and keep job creation robust, no
matter what the consequences to the economy's long-term health; and where the U.S.
financial sector, with its skewed incentives, is the critical but unstable link between an
overstimulated America and an underconsuming world.
In Fault Lines, Rajan demonstrates how
unequal access to education and health care in the United States puts us all in deeper
financial peril, even as the economic choices of countries like Germany, Japan, and China
place an undue burden on America to get its policies right. He outlines the hard choices
we need to make to ensure a more stable world economy and restore lasting prosperity.
Raghuram G. Rajan is the Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Service
Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and former
chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. He is the coauthor of "Saving
Capitalism from the Capitalists" (Princeton).
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1
Chapter One: Let Them Eat Credit 21
Chapter Two: Exporting to Grow 46
Chapter Three: Flighty Foreign Financing 68
Chapter Four: A Weak Safety Net 83
Chapter Five: From Bubble to Bubble 101
Chapter Six: When Money Is the Measure of All Worth 120
Chapter Seven: Betting the Bank 134
Chapter Eight: Reforming Finance 154
Chapter Nine: Improving Access to Opportunity in America 183
Chapter Ten: The Fable of the Bees Replayed 202
Epilogue 225
Afterword to the Paperback Edition 231
Notes 241
Index 257
272 pages, Paperback