I am not excessively concerned over Japan | NOURIEL ROUBINI BLOG

Thursday, December 26, 2013

I am not excessively concerned over Japan

And how about the original: Japan? If Abenomics works, inflation should rise and with it yields. How big is the risk of reaching a tipping point, when Japan will have trouble servicing its huge debt?
Nouriel Roubini : There is a whole bunch of counterarguments. First, you achieve 2% of inflation only when growth is robust. The better the growth in Japan – either because of monetary and fiscal stimulus or structural reforms – the better is the outlook for the debt dynamics. Second, there is no 1:1 relation between inflation rate and long term yields, as long as a central bank is aggressively buying a big fraction of these bonds for a prolonged period of time. Then the real rates tend to become negative – if inflation goes up even more, which again helps the debt dynamics. I am not excessively concerned over Japan. Of course, in the medium term Japan needs more structural reforms to enhance its growth potential, because only growth can really resolve the debt dynamics, fiscal adjustment alone is not sufficient. But they have time. - in www.fuw.ch

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.