Outlook for Indonesia : Prospects are still pretty strong | NOURIEL ROUBINI BLOG

Monday, November 18, 2013

Outlook for Indonesia : Prospects are still pretty strong

Nouriel Roubini

Nouriel Roubini

Question: You’re known as Dr. Doom, the man who usually has a bearish forecast for the global economy. And yet, you have always had a positive outlook on Indonesia. What’s behind your faith in the Indonesian economy?

Nouriel Roubini : First of all, I don’t think I’m Dr. Doom. I’m Dr. Realist. I try to correctly understand what’s going on in the global economy. A few years ago, there was a global financial crisis, but now there is recovery. The emerging markets for the last few years have done overall much better than advanced economies.

And if I look at Indonesia, I would say that the medium-term prospects are still pretty strong in terms of actual and potential growth, being at least 6 percent if not higher. The existence of external deficit, slightly higher than target inflation, has led to some concerns and some financial pressures on the currency, the bond market and the equity market.

But even with the short-term noise and volatility, if you look at medium-term, long-term fundamentals, I think this is still an economy that is very sound. So, you have to be realistic about different countries in the world. - in The Jakarta Post

Nouriel Roubini is an American professor of Economics at New York University`s Stern School of Business and chairman of RGE Roubini Global Economics

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.