He Does It Without Boasting

In this collection of recent material, a master foreteller of economic phenomena dazzles with his unpacking of the complex interplay between polity and finance

- Sunil Bahri

There has been a welcome ups­urge in the quality and quantity of public discourse on matters of economic policy and polity in the last few days. After a self-imposed silence of a year, Raghuram Rajan, former governor of the RBI, is here for the release of his new book. It’s not a memoir of a central banker, of which there have been many. Rajan aquired global stature by first red-flagging the fragility of the Western financial system while everyone was ‘dancing to the music’ and then laying bare in his 2010 bestseller Faultlines the underlying socio-eco­no­mic causes, in particular the growing inequality of opportunity in the US, leading up to the mortgage crisis.