The BRICS were overhyped for too long | NOURIEL ROUBINI BLOG

Thursday, September 5, 2013

The BRICS were overhyped for too long

These economies – the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and others – were overhyped for too long. Favorable external conditions – the effect of China’s strong growth on higher commodity prices and easy money from yield-hungry advanced-economy investors – led to a partly artificial boom. Now that the party is over, the hangover is setting in.

This is especially true in India, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa, and Indonesia, all of which suffer from multiple macroeconomic and policy weaknesses – large current-account deficits, wide fiscal deficits, slowing growth, and above-target inflation – as well as growing social protest and political uncertainty ahead of elections in the next 12-18 months. There are no easy choices: defending the currency by hiking interest rates would kill growth and harm banks and corporate firms; loosening monetary policy to boost growth might push their currencies into free-fall, causing a spike in inflation and jeopardizing their ability to attract capital to finance their external deficits. - in 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.