Fault Lines
by Raghuram Rajan (Princeton University Press, £18.95)

Since its publication six months ago, Fault Lines has divided opinion amongst economists and policymakers. While it has been shortlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year award (the winner is be announced on 27th October), it has also attracted sharp recent criticism from Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman. The critics are wrong: Raghuram Rajan’s analysis of the global financial crisis remains highly relevant and deserves to be widely read.

Fault Lines borrows a geological term for its title—because, it argues, the crisis was due to a number of economic and political “fault lines” that have been left out of much of the discussion of what went wrong in the global financial system. Rajan, formerly the chief economist at the IMF and now professor of finance at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, is not in the blame