"Central bankers have had enormous responsibilities thrust on them to compensate, essentially, for the failings of the political system. And my worry is we don’t have sufficient tools to do that, but we’re not willing to say it. And, as a result, we push as hard as we can on the existing tools, and they may create more risk in the system."
-- Raghuram Rajan, Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. In other words, he runs India's central bank. The quote is from this interview with him in the FT today (registration may be required). He used to be an economist at the University of Chicago's business school, and is former chief economist of the IMF.
Rajan is famous for a prescient 2005 paper, "Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?" Larry Summers famously derided him when Rajan presented the paper at the 2005 Jackson Hole conference, but Rajan got the last laugh. (I love stories in which nice guys finish first.)
