Raghuram Rajan on the Impact of the Ratcheting Effect of The Fed's QE Program

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Raghuram Rajan is a finance professor at the University of Chicago and leads the Group of 30. Previously he was the chief economist at the IMF and the governor of the Reserve Bank of India. In Raghuram's first appearance on the show, he discusses his famous 2005 Jackson Hole speech, how he righted the ship on India's emerging economy, the consequences of zero-sum thinking, the differences between being a policymaker and an academic, the ratcheting effect of QE on the Fed's balance sheet, and much more.

Check out the transcript for this week's episode, now with links.

Recorded on January 20th, 2026

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Timestamps

00:00:00 - Intro

00:01:58 - Raghu's Career

00:22:20 - Policymaker Versus Academic

00:29:00 - Ratcheting Effect of Quantitative Easing

01:01:06 - Outro