Raghuram Rajan

Raghuram G. Rajan at an IMF press conference in 2004

Raghuram Govind Rajan (born February 3, 1963 in Bhopal , India ) is an Indian-American economist . Since 1995 he has been a professor at the University of Chicago . He advises the Indian Prime Minister. From 2003 to 2006 he was chief economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF). From September 4, 2013 to September 19, 2016, he headed the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Since November 9, 2015, Rajan has been Vice Chairman of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).

Life

Raghuram Rajan was born in the Indian city of Bhopal. The son of an Indian diplomat, Rajan lived in Indonesia , Sri Lanka and Belgium during his childhood . He studied engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi before moving to Ahmedabad his MBA made and finally in 1991 at MIT for a dissertation titled Essays on Banking doctorate was. Since then he has taught at the University of Chicago, where he was appointed professor in 1995. In 2003 he was awarded the Fischer Black Prize . From 2003 to 2006 he was - as successor to Kenneth Rogoff - chief economist of the International Monetary Fund. In 2013 he received the Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics . On September 4, 2013, he took over from D. Subbarao as head of the Indian central bank, the Mumbai-based Reserve Bank of India . Partly against considerable political pressure, he stuck to the course of strict inflation control . After the end of his three-year term on September 19, 2016, he ended his work as RBI governor.

Since 2017, Clarivate Analytics has been one of the favorites for an Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics ( Clarivate Citation Laureates , formerly Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates ) due to the number of his citations .

research

Rajan considers markets and competition to be important drivers of the economy, but - unlike Chicago professors traditionally do this - also thinks about market failure . " Keynes versus Friedman - this is the old argument," he says. His first monograph was entitled Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists .

Warning of the financial crisis

When Alan Greenspan's farewell was to be celebrated at the annual meeting of the world's central bankers in Jackson Hole in 2005 , Rajan disrupted the harmony with a presentation entitled Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier? He answered yes to the question. In his manuscript, he warned: "The interbank market could freeze and there could easily be a full-blown financial crisis." Most of the other participants at the conference rejected his conclusion. Lawrence Summers said the presuppositions for his work were incorrect.

Explanation of the financial crisis

In retrospect, Rajan explained the financial crisis as follows in his book Fault Lines : Faced with enormous economic inequality in the US (the highest since 1929), governments propagated - possibly unconsciously - loans that poor people could use to buy a house. “Tax policies and redistribution seemed difficult in the polarized environment,” says Rajan. “But left and right political camps were able to agree on putting more money into the housing sector.” However, many of the new borrowers could not even afford a house. This created a credit bubble that later burst.

He found the idea for this declaration in his native India, where banks in poor regions give a particularly large number of loans. "Populism and credit often go together," says Rajan.

Government spending and sustainable growth

In spring 2012, in an article in Foreign Affairs , Rajan criticized the idea that the West could free itself from the economic crisis through government spending. For decades, the West has been falling behind in terms of technology and global competition, and the growth artificially obtained to compensate for government debts and lending is not sustainable. Rajan's structural problems in the United States include insufficient workforce training and lack of entrepreneurship and innovation. Above all, southern Europe must reduce its protectionism and state presence in several areas, thereby eliminating unnecessary and unproductive work.

Honors

• 2003: Fischer Black Prize
• 2009: Admission to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 2010: Bernhard Harms Prize from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy
• 2013: Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics
• 2017: Adam Smith Prize

Publications

Monographs

• with Luigi Zingales : Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists . Princeton University Press, 2004, ISBN 0-691-12128-1 .
• Fault lines . Princeton University Press, 2010, ISBN 978-0-691-14683-6 .
  • German: Fault Lines - faults. why they still threaten the world economy and what to do now. Finanzbuch Verlag, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-89879-685-9 .
• with the Squam Lake Working Group : The Squam Lake Report: Fixing the Financial System . Princeton University Press, 2010, ISBN 978-0-691-14884-7 .

items

• Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier? NBER Working Paper 11728 , November 2005
• True Lessons of the Recession. (PDF) In: Foreign Affairs. 5/2012.

Web links

Commons : Raghuram Rajan  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Homepage at the University of Chicago
• Entry on ideas.repec.org

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Press releases. BIS Board appoints Raghuram Rajan as Vice-Chairman. Bank for International Settlements , November 10, 2015, accessed August 25, 2019 . 
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Patrick Bernau: The new Chicago boy. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. July 4, 2010, accessed April 13, 2013 . 
3. ↑ RAGHURAM G. RAJAN. (PDF; 27 kB) In: faculty.chicagogsb.edu/. Archived from the original on February 15, 2010 ; accessed on August 25, 2019 . 
4. ^ ^{A b} Fischer Black Prize. (No longer available online.) Afajof.org , archived from the original on January 4, 2014 ; accessed on October 11, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
5. ↑ Statement by Dr. Raghuram Rajan on taking office. In: The Hindu. 4th September 2013.
6. ↑ Volker Pabst: The country's most prominent economist resigns. In: www.nzz.ch. September 4, 2016, accessed December 10, 2018 . 
7. ↑ The 2017 Clarivate Citation Laureates - Clarivate. In: clarivate.com. Retrieved September 21, 2017 . 
8. ↑ Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier? NBER Working Paper 11728, November 2005.
9. ↑ Justin Lahart: Mr. Rajan Was Unpopular (But Prescient) at Greenspan Party. In: Wall Street Journal. January 2, 2009.
10. ↑ We need a correction of the incentives in the system. ( Memento from August 18, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Interview with Raghuram Rajan in the KPMG publication “Determined to act”, 2010.
11. ^ True Lessons of the Recession. ( Memento of the original from May 4, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF), accessed on June 9, 2012. 
12. ↑ Bernhard Harms Prize. (No longer available online.) Ifw-kiel.de , archived from the original on June 14, 2013 ; Retrieved June 15, 2013 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.