The Dark Matter of Financial Globalization by Nouriel Roubini | NOURIEL ROUBINI BLOG

Friday, October 26, 2012

The Dark Matter of Financial Globalization by Nouriel Roubini

The recent turmoil in global financial markets – and the liquidity and credit crunch that followed – raises two questions: how did defaulting sub-prime mortgages in the American states of California, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida lead to a worldwide crisis? And why did systemic risk increase rather than decrease in recent years? CommentsBlame should go to the phenomenon of “securitization.” In the past, banks kept loans and mortgages on their books, retaining the credit risk. For example, during the housing bust in the United States in the late 1980’s, many banks that were mortgage lenders (the Savings ampamp; Loans Associations) went belly up, leading to a banking crisis, a credit crunch, and a recession in 1990-1991. CommentsThis systemic risk – a financial shock leading to severe economic contagion – was supposed to be reduced by securitization. Financial globalization meant that banks no longer held assets like mortgages on their books, but packaged them in asset-backed securities that were sold to investors in capital markets worldwide, thereby distributing risk more widely. via The Dark Matter of Financial Globalization by Nouriel Roubini – Project Syndicate.

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.