“Three factors—land, natural resources, and government contracts or licenses—are the predominant sources of the wealth of our billionaires,” he argued. “The numbers are alarming—too many people have gotten too rich based on their proximity to the government.” These ideas anticipated almost exactly the corruption scandals that washed over Singh’s government a few years later, in which assets like land and coal were found to have been doled out to favored businesses, creating losses of tens of billions of dollars from the public purse. So deep-rooted did these problems become that Rajan
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