Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy
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Winner of 2010 FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award 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. Phillip Swagel - Finance & Development Former IMF chief economist Raghuram G. Rajan . . . in his new book, Fault Lines, brings together and explains the diverse failings that contributed to the crisis—the fault lines, as he puts it, that were exposed by the events of the past several years. Rajan then puts forward broad policy recommendations to ward off a future problem. . . . Rajan's book takes a comprehensive look at what got us into the crisis and offers an intriguing approach to avoiding another one.
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 Notes 231
