Raghuram Rajan

At the 2005 Jackson Hole symposium hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Rajan presented a paper arguing that financial innovation and compensation structures had created incentives for excessive risk-taking that could trigger a catastrophic systemic crisis. His warnings were dismissed or even ridiculed by prominent attendees at the time but proved remarkably prescient.

During his tenure from September 2013 to September 2016, Rajan established a formal inflation-targeting framework to bring India's persistently high inflation under control and launched a major initiative to restructure distressed bank loans. He also oversaw the licensing of new payments banks designed to expand financial inclusion among India's unbanked population.

Rajan served as chief economist at the International Monetary Fund from 2003 to 2006, where he co-authored influential research on financial development and economic growth. Before and after his IMF tenure, he was a professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Rajan co-authored 'Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists' (2003) with Luigi Zingales and authored 'Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy' (2010), which won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. 'Fault Lines' traced the roots of the 2008 crisis to structural political and economic pressures beyond the banking sector itself.