Germany cannot stand idly by in the spending splurge | NOURIEL ROUBINI BLOG

Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Germany cannot stand idly by in the spending splurge

by Nouriel Roubini for Gulf News :

The latest economic data from the Eurozone suggests that recovery may be at hand. What is driving the upturn? What obstacles does it face? And what can be done to sustain it?

The immediate causes of recovery are not difficult to discern. Last year, the Eurozone was on the verge of a double-dip recession. When it recently fell into technical deflation, the European Central Bank (ECB) finally pulled the trigger on aggressive easing and launched a combination of quantitative easing (including sovereign-bond purchases) and negative policy rates.

The financial impact was immediate: in anticipation of monetary easing, and after it began, the euro fell sharply, bond yields in the Eurozone’s core and periphery fell to very low levels, and stock markets started to rally robustly.

This, together with the sharp fall in oil prices, boosted economic growth.
read more @ http://gulfnews.com/business/analysis/germany-cannot-stand-idly-by-in-the-spending-splurge-1.1487538

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.