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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Raghuram Rajan Quotes

Customers often value a good more when its price goes up. One reason may be its signaling value. An expensive handcrafted mechanical watch may tell time no more accurately than a cheap quartz model; but, because few people can afford one, buying it signals that the owner is rich.

– Raghuram Rajan

Politicians know that structural reforms – to increase competition, foster innovation, and drive institutional change – are the way to tackle structural impediments to growth. But they know that while the pain from reform is immediate, gains are typically delayed and their beneficiaries uncertain.

– Raghuram Rajan

Common man is always benefited by a rate cut.

– Raghuram Rajan

Every adverse development across the world affects the rest of the world in some way.

– Raghuram Rajan

The gap in India has always been between the promise and the execution.

– Raghuram Rajan

I am a 10th class pass in Hindi. From 7th grade to 12th grade, I was in Delhi; before that, I was abroad. I came in not knowing a word of Hindi in 7th grade and learned Hindi and passed the exam in 10th. I think I was north of 50 percent, so I feel very proud of that accomplishment.

– Raghuram Rajan

As a country that does not belong to any power bloc, India cannot afford to put itself in the position of needing multilateral support – a trap into which even developed countries, like Portugal and Spain, have fallen.

– Raghuram Rajan

How do we get more politicians to move from ‘fixing’ the system to reforming the system? The obvious answer is to either improve the quality of public services or reduce the public’s dependence on them. Both approaches are necessary.

– Raghuram Rajan

I have said repeatedly that the way to sustainable growth is to bring down inflation to much more reasonable levels.

– Raghuram Rajan

Perhaps the hardest challenge has been to persuade the public, impatient for rapid growth, of the need to ensure stability first. Growth, it is argued, is always more important, regardless of the looming economic risks.

– Raghuram Rajan

Central bankers have had enormous responsibilities thrust on them to compensate, essentially, for the failings of the political system. And my worry is we don’t have sufficient tools to do that, but we’re not willing to say it.

– Raghuram Rajan

What is important for a central banker is that you have to convey that you know what you are doing.

– Raghuram Rajan

The U.S. should worry about the effects of its polices on the rest of the world. We would like to live in a world where countries take into account the effect of their policies on other countries and do what is right, broadly, rather than what is just right given the circumstances of that country.

– Raghuram Rajan

The idea was never for me to be a career bureaucrat or career technocrat; it was more about where I could implement ideas and reform programs.

– Raghuram Rajan

Competition is like a treadmill. If you stand still, you get swept off. But when you run, you can never really get ahead of the treadmill and cover new terrain – so you never run faster than the speed that is set.

– Raghuram Rajan

Instead of abandoning competition and giving banks protected monopolies once again, the public would be better served by making it easier to close banks when they get into trouble. Instead of making banking boring, let us make it a normal industry, susceptible to destruction in the face of creativity.

– Raghuram Rajan

One of the difficulties of a job in the, quote, ‘real world’ is you don’t really get time to shut yourself off in a room and think.

– Raghuram Rajan

I will say this: the central banks can actually support growth beyond a point. When there is no inflation, they can cut interest rates, and that is the way they support growth, but if you cut interest rate to the bone, there is nothing more to cut. It is very hard to support growth beyond that.

– Raghuram Rajan

The first step to prescribing the right medicine is to recognize the cause of the illness. And, when it comes to what is ailing the global economy, extreme monetary easing has been more cause than cure. The sooner we recognize that, the stronger and more sustainable the global economic recovery will be.

– Raghuram Rajan

Endorsing unconventional monetary policies unquestioningly is tantamount to saying that it is acceptable to distort asset prices if there are other domestic constraints on growth.

– Raghuram Rajan

The more that everyone has access to the same educational opportunities, the more society will tend to accept some receiving disproportionate rewards. After all, they themselves have a chance to be winners.

– Raghuram Rajan

Taking my bike out and riding the bike path along Lake Shore Drive, that’s one of the great experiences in my life. And I hope to do it as long as I can.

– Raghuram Rajan

If economists were to wait for careful studies before offering opinions about policy, we would never have anything timely to say.

– Raghuram Rajan

It is the central bank governor, unlike other regulators or government secretaries, who has command over significant policy levers and has to occasionally disagree with the most powerful people in the country.

– Raghuram Rajan

The difficulty in a number of Western democracies is that the playing field is being tilted. For many in the middle class, prosperity seems unattainable because a good education – today’s passport to riches – is unaffordable.

– Raghuram Rajan

The government will always tell you that it wants low inflation. The real issue is the horizon over which to bring inflation down.

– Raghuram Rajan

I am an academic, and I have always made it clear that my ultimate home is in the realm of ideas.

– Raghuram Rajan

Ultimately, in the long run we need to immunise our system from being overly responsive to fluctuations in the exchange rate; that is, people should, by and large, be reasonably hedged, or they should borrow more in domestic currency rather than foreign currency.

– Raghuram Rajan

The American political scientist Francis Fukuyama has argued that liberal democracies, with their political freedom and economic success, have three important pillars: a strong government, the rule of law, and democratic accountability. I would add a fourth: free markets.

– Raghuram Rajan

In a world with weak aggregate demand, countries are engaging in a futile competition for a greater share of it. In the process, they are creating financial-sector and cross-border risks that will become increasingly apparent as countries exit their unconventional policies.

– Raghuram Rajan

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