Fault Lines

How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy

By: Raghuram G. Rajan

Narrated by: Devin Ryan Pearl

Length: 11 hrs and 19 mins

Publisher's summary

Raghuram Rajan was one of the few economists who warned of the global financial crisis before it hit. Now, as the world struggles to recover, it's tempting to blame what happened on just a few greedy bankers who took irrational risks and left the rest of us to foot the bill. In Fault Lines, Rajan argues that serious flaws in the economy are also to blame and warns that a potentially more devastating crisis awaits us if they aren't fixed.

Rajan shows how the individual choices that collectively brought about the economic meltdown - made by bankers, government officials, and ordinary homeowners - were rational responses to a flawed global financial order in which the incentives to take on risk are incredibly out of step with the dangers those risks pose. He traces the deepening fault lines in a world overly dependent on the indebted American consumer to power global economic growth and stave off global downturns. He exposes a system where America's growing inequality and thin social safety net create tremendous political pressure to encourage easy credit and keep job creation robust, no matter what the consequences to the economy's long-term health and where the US financial sector, with its skewed incentives, is the critical but unstable link between an overstimulated America and an underconsuming world.

In Fault Lines, Rajan demonstrates how unequal access to education and health care in the United States puts us all in deeper financial peril, even as the economic choices of countries like Germany, Japan, and China place an undue burden on America to get its policies right. He outlines the hard choices we need to make to ensure a more stable world economy and restore lasting prosperity.

©2010, 2011 Raghuram G. Rajan (P)2017 Audible, Inc.

great book, but awful accent on the voice,

the book is great but the voice accent is really hard to listen. mixed feelings

Only problem was with the narrator

Great book, but terrible job by the narrator in this version (honestly and with all due respect)... reads twice certain parts (as if the narrator got distracted and had to start over in the middle of a sentence)... pronunciation was also challenging to understand very often (for instance the word mortgages always sounded like more-cages... eventually you got used to it, but it is not ideal to actually stay focused on the story)

Narrator makes mistakes

Any additional comments?

The narrator's accent is good and went along with the Indian author Rajan. But, he makes a lot of mistakes and has to repeat many sentences which could've easily been edited out. I do not know how the audible's narration works but this just looks like laziness from the narrator and audible.

Narrator makes this almost unbearable

This book has some interesting ideas in it. However, the narrator makes it much harder to follow by his peculiar accent and just mispronunciation. Example? "Ben Bernank is a member of the Elight that controls our echoNOMie." Indeed, I am fairly convinced that the narrator does not even know what he is reading. The peculiarities of speech are so extreme that the listener is constantly straining to interpret what is said and cannot focus on the meaning.

Whoever is responsible for employing Devin Ryan Pearl as a narrator of this book should be fired. Mr Pearl has no talent as an English speaking narrator. Save your money. If you care, just buy the book.