Nouriel Roubini on Threats to the Global Economy | NOURIEL ROUBINI BLOG

Saturday, August 11, 2012

Nouriel Roubini on Threats to the Global Economy

Nouriel Roubini : The underlying economic forces are partially independent of policy choices. I don’t think that if [John] McCain had been elected, the economy would be any better than it is today. Maybe even worse. And therefore, I think that once you have a crisis, once you have too much debt or once you have painful deleveraging, that cost of deleveraging has to occur over a period of many years, and economic policy is not going to make much of a difference. However, policymakers do make a difference, because the Great Recession could have ended up a great depression if we had not learned the lessons of the Great Depression. The case of deleveraging, whether it’s ugly or semi-ugly or less ugly, depends on doing some of the right things. I think that having massive monetary easing, having massive fiscal easing, having backstopped the financial system properly—sometimes not totally properly—made a difference. In Europe, in fact, where policy has been to accelerate the private- and the public-sector deleveraging, we are already double dipping. So policy can make a difference. - in Business Week

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.