Raghuram Rajan

Why organisations work with Raghuram Rajan

• The Fault Lines framework – winner of the 2010 FT-Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year – gives organisations a specific, named diagnostic for distinguishing structural economic imbalance from cyclical volatility. That is a different tool from scenario planning or macroeconomic outlook, and more useful at board level.
• He is the only prominent economist to have publicly and formally predicted the 2008 financial crisis in advance – at the Federal Reserve’s Jackson Hole symposium in 2005 – and been dismissed at the time. That track record is a credential no other economics speaker holds.
• He governed a major central bank through a period of acute currency stress and capital flight, giving senior audiences access to decision-making insight from inside a monetary authority under pressure – not retrospective academic analysis of one.
• His Third Pillar argument – that markets and states, operating without healthy communities, produce the political backlash that now defines operating risk for global organisations – provides a structural explanation for the instability that most business risk frameworks treat as noise.
• As Chairman of the Group of Thirty, the senior body that shapes global monetary and financial policy thinking, his analysis is current and policy-facing, not retrospective.

Biography highlights

• Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
• 23rd Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (2013–2016); Vice-Chairman, Board of the Bank for International Settlements (2015–2016)
• Chief Economist and Director of Research, International Monetary Fund (2003–2006)
• Presented research at the Federal Reserve’s Jackson Hole symposium in 2005 warning of structural financial risk – widely recognised as a prescient forecast of the 2008 global financial crisis
• Author of Fault Lines (FT-Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year, 2010) and The Third Pillar (shortlisted, FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year, 2019); co-author of Breaking the Mould (Princeton University Press, 2024)
• Chairman, Group of Thirty; Chairman, Per Jacobsson Foundation; Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Fischer Black Prize, American Finance Association (inaugural, 2003); Deutsche Bank Prize for Financial Economics (2013); Euromoney Central Banker of the Year (2014); Banker Magazine Central Banker of the Year (2016)
• Regular contributor to Project Syndicate on global economic and monetary policy

Biography

Financial crises don’t arrive without signals – they arrive without being believed. In 2005, at the Federal Reserve’s annual Jackson Hole symposium, Rajan presented research identifying structural risks in the financial system that could, if unaddressed, precipitate a major crisis. The then-US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers dismissed the analysis publicly. Three years later, the 2008 financial crisis unfolded.

That episode anchors Rajan’s central argument, developed in Fault Lines – the 2010 FT-Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year – that global financial crises are rooted in structural political and economic imbalances, not isolated market failures. He applied this framework at the level of actual policy: as Chief Economist at the IMF from 2003 to 2006, shaping global economic analysis across a period of significant financial stress; and as the 23rd Governor of the Reserve Bank of India from 2013 to 2016, managing monetary policy through currency pressure and capital outflows that tested emerging market resilience.

His 2019 book The Third Pillar, shortlisted for the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year, extends the argument into political economy. The conventional debate between markets and the state, Rajan contends, ignores the community as a third and equally necessary foundation of economic stability. When that pillar erodes – as globalisation concentrates gains and disperses costs – the political backlash follows. That dynamic now constitutes a primary operating risk for organisations across every sector.

As Chairman of the Group of Thirty, a regular contributor to Project Syndicate, and co-author of Breaking the Mould (Princeton University Press, 2024) – which proposes a new economic development path for India as the traditional manufacturing-led growth model becomes less viable – Rajan continues to work at the intersection of economic analysis and practical policy, where the consequences of getting the diagnosis wrong are most clearly visible.

Key speaking topics

• Global macroeconomics and financial stability
• Structural risk and the conditions that precede financial crises
• Central banking and monetary policy
• Emerging markets and economic development
• Political economy: globalisation, populism, and community
• India’s economic trajectory and structural reform
• ESG, corporate disclosure, and responsible capitalism

Ideal for

• Boards and executive leadership teams at multinational organisations assessing macroeconomic and geopolitical risk
• Senior leadership in financial services – banking, asset management, insurance, and central banking institutions
• Chief strategy officers and chief risk officers stress-testing global market assumptions
• Government bodies, policy forums, and international economic organisations

Audience outcomes

• A specific framework for reading structural fault lines in the global economy, distinct from standard macroeconomic forecasting
• Grounded understanding of how central banks weigh political pressure against policy mandates – from someone who managed that tension in office
• A clearer account of why globalisation generates political backlash, and what that means for organisations operating across different political environments
• Context for emerging market risk – particularly India – built on policy experience rather than external analysis
• A more rigorous basis for stress-testing the macroeconomic assumptions embedded in corporate strategy and investment decisions