Rajan’s deregulatory academic positions predated and contradicted his public crisis warnings

Evidence

Perhaps Cassidy would have been better prepared if he had first perused a paper Rajan had written back in 1994 suggesting that the Glass-Steagall Act had constituted unnecessary regulation back in the 1930s, because commingling of investment and commercial banking had not ratcheted up the riskiness of the entire system, and in any event, “We find no evidence that commercial banks systematically fooled the public securities markets.” Rajan was True Blue Chicago, so of course he defended the home team to Cassidy: “Forget the public utterances: the research done at this place was, essentially, right on the ball.” — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 495

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth checking Rajan’s actual 1994 Glass-Steagall paper against the 2005 Jackson Hole warning — is the perceived ‘open-mindedness’ a purely media construction?