Raghuram Rajan, one of the few economists to see the financial crisis coming, wins the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs business book of the Year award.

Raghuram Rajan collected the £30,000 prize for Fault Lines in New York on Wednesday.

The book identifies the flaws that helped cripple the world financial system, prescribes potential remedies, but also warns that unless policymakers push through painful reforms, the world could be plunged into renewed turmoil.

 

Lionel Barber, FT editor and chair of the judging panel, praised Fault Lines as a “serious and sober business book” for a time when “sobriety is a virtue”.

The title, published by Princeton University Press, saw off stiff competition from five others on the shortlist, to be chosen as “the most compelling and enjoyable” business book of 2010. The final intense debate among the seven judges came down to a choice between Fault Lines and Too Big to Fail, Andrew Ross Sorkin’s acclaimed minute-by-minute analysis of the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

Prof Rajan was the International Monetary Fund’s chief economist when he warned the 2005 Jackson Hole conference of central bankers that the seeds of disaster were being sown in the financial sector. His presentation jarred with the self-congratulatory tone of the conference, Alan Greenspan’s last as chairman of the US Federal Reserve. Prof Rajan writes in the book that the critical reaction from other participants made him feel “like an early Christian who had wandered into a convention of half-starved lions”. But within three years, his analysis had been vindicated.

 

Raghuram Rajan: is the Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. He was appointed an honorary adviser to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2008, and headed a committee appointed by the Planning Commission on financial reforms in India. Prior to resuming teaching in 2007, Dr. Rajan was the Economic Counselor and Director of Research at the International Monetary Fund. Since then, he has chaired the Indian government’s Committee on Financial Sector Reforms, which submitted its report in 2008. He won the business book in 2010.