U.S. Banks Need a Dose of Creative Destruction Roubini Says

Thursday, May 7, 2009

U.S. Banks Need a Dose of Creative Destruction Roubini Says

By Alan Purkiss

May 7 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. government's stress tests on 19 U.S. banks, the results of which are to be published today, will be presented as showing that none have failed, but the market will judge otherwise, said Nouriel Roubini and Matthew Richardson, both economists at New York University.

Writing in the Financial Times, they said institutions needing billions of dollars of extra capital will be considered close to insolvency and will therefore be unable to raise outside capital, so the government will have to step in again.

The question is whether it's right to help these banks, or whether the government should instead let them fail and concentrate instead on ways of managing the systemic risk of such failures, Roubini and Richardson said.

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Nouriel Roubini, (born March 29, 1958, Istanbul, Turkey), Turkish-born American economist and educator who was best known for predicting the 2007–08 subprime mortgage crisis in the United States and the subsequent global financial crisis.

Born to Iranian Jewish parents, Roubini moved with his family to Iran and Israel before they settled in Italy in 1962. After a year at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he studied economics at Bocconi University in Milan (B.A., 1982) and Harvard University (Ph.D., 1988), where he specialized in macroeconomics and international economics. He joined the economics faculty at Yale University in 1988 and taught there until 1995, when he moved to New York University. He also served as a visiting scholar to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), was a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), held single-year terms on the White House Council of Economic Advisers (1998–99) and at the U.S. Department of the Treasury (1999–2000), and cofounded (2004) the consulting firm Roubini Global Economics. Roubini spent much of his early career studying countries that experienced extreme economic failures, such as Mexico (in 1994), Thailand and other countries associated with the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Russia (1998), and Argentina (2000). He determined that each shared one common element: a massive current account deficit.(www.britannica.com)

Nouriel Roubini is the Chairman and CEO of Roubini Macro Associates, LLC, his own global macroeconomic consultancy firm. He is also a professor of economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Dr. Roubini has extensive policy experience as well as broad academic credentials. From 1998 to 2000, he served as the senior economist for international affairs on the White House Council of Economic Advisors and then the senior advisor to the undersecretary for international affairs at the U.S. Treasury Department, helping to resolve the Asian and global financial crises, among other issues. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and numerous other prominent public and private institutions have drawn upon his consulting expertise.

NOURIEL ROUBINI BLOG

Thursday, May 7, 2009