Raghuram Rajan

Too many years away from academia renders you pretty incompetent at research and teaching. So I had to go back.

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

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.

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.

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.

Everyone may have some advise for the RBI. Some may advise, 'Cut your lending rates and raise the deposit rate.' How will a bank function? We take a medium term view. The bank has an 80-year-old history. I don't want to destroy it for a few decisions.

If anybody was to look towards a big source of demand in future, it would be hard for them to miss India.

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.

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.

If developed countries' citizens want to feel slightly better about their economies' slow growth and high unemployment, they should contemplate how much worse matters could be without the institutions that they have.

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