Raghuram Rajan: Working on thin files

IN ADDITION

Fifty years of Asia The profiles: 23 of the biggest names in Asia Zafrul Aziz Laura Cha Wei Sun Christianson Piyush Gupta Uday Kotak Reuben Lai Boon Chye Loh Agus Martowardojo Jahja Setiaatmadja Weijian Shan Alan Smith Teh Hong Piow Tian Huiyu Sun Yu Nestor Tan Wee Ee Cheong Kartika Wirjoatmodjo Peter Wong Daniel Wu Wu Wei Joseph Yam Zeti Akhtar Aziz

There was a time, not so long ago, when Raghuram Rajan was branded a Luddite by Lawrence Summers. He laughs about it now.

“As an academic or a thinker, if you’re not criticized, then you’re not really doing your job,” he says. “You’re providing anodyne commentary, which everyone can go along with and which upsets no one.”

Rajan was chief economist for the IMF at the time and had said that there were serious problems within the banking industry; by 2008 he was proved right.

He had been employed by the IMF in the lingering aftermath of the Asian financial crisis amid a sense that the multilateral had played the whole thing wrong.