Raghuram Rajan is the hands down co-winner of the best title for any economics book in recent years: Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists. It was also a very good book.

Relative to this stellar predecessor, Fault Lines was a disappointment. The thesis is that a number of fault lines contributed to the financial crisis and continue to leave us vulnerable. In Rajan's view these include: (i) inequality which led to encouraging over-borrowing as a palliative; (ii) a system without automatic stabilizers that leads the Fed to overreact with overly low, bubble-causing interest rates during downturns; (iii) faulty financial regulation and corporate governance that breeds and exacerbates bubbles; and (iv) global macroeconomic imbalances.

In some cases the diagnosis seems apt, in others I would much more strongly disagree, but most of them are reasonably predictable -- albeit it would be hard to predict that any one person would share this eclectic a set of views.

Rajan proposes solutions to most of these fault lines, some of which seem more commensurate to the challenge than others. The most interesting is the notion that the economy would be less bubble prone if it had a more robust social safety net, including health insurance (which we now have), automatically extended unemployment insurance, etc.

As to the disappointment, it stems partly from thinking some of Rajan's arguments are tendentious (e.g., putting disproportionate blame on the government's home ownership policies for the subprime meltdown) and some are pretty obvious. The book is also marred from too many three-page literature summaries of everything from the causes of inequality to universal health care where Rajan does not have as much to add as he does in areas closer to his specialization like finance.