Nouriel Roubini biography

Nouriel Roubini is an American economist, chairman of Roubini Global Economics, an economic consultancy firm. He also teaches at New York University's Stern School of Business. Roubini was one of the few economists to predict the recent global financial crisis. One of the world’s most sought-after voices on its causes and consequences, he previously served in the Clinton administration as Senior Economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, and has worked for the International Monetary Fund, the US Federal Reserve, and the World Bank.

Roubini's critical economic views have earned him the nicknames "Dr. Doom" and "permabear" in the media. As Roubini's descriptions of the current economic crisis have proven to be accurate, he is today a major figure in the U.S. and international debate about the economy, and spends much of his time shuttling between meetings with central bank governors and finance ministers in Europe and Asia.

Roubini and political scientist Ian Bremmer have described the 21st century world as fragmenting economically and politically, where the "old models of understanding global dynamics are struggling" to keep up with rapid changes. In an article in Foreign Affairs magazine, they describe what they call a "G-Zero world," where the United States no longer has the resources to continue as the primary provider of global public goods. As a result, there is likely to be more conflict than cooperation between countries, creating a "zero sum game," a "game in which my win is your loss."

Nouriel Roubini was born March 29, 1959 in Istanbul, Turkey, to Iranian Jewish parents. When he was an infant, his family lived briefly in Iran and Israel. From 1962 to 1983 he resided in Italy, especially in Milan, where he attended the local Jewish school and then the Bocconi University, earning a B.A., summa cum laude, in economics. He received his Ph.D. in international economics from Harvard University in 1988, where his adviser was Jeffrey Sachs. Roubini is is an U.S. citizen and speaks English, Persian, Italian, Hebrew, and conversational French.

After receiving his Ph.D. he became an academic at Yale and a practicing economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Federal Reserve, World Bank, and Bank of Israel. Much of his early research focused on emerging markets. During the administration of President Bill Clinton, he was a senior economist for the Council of Economic Advisers, later moving to the United States Treasury Department as a senior adviser to Timothy Geithner, who in 2009 became Treasury Secretary.

Roubini returned to the IMF in 2001 as a visiting scholar while it battled a financial meltdown in Argentina. He co-wrote a book on saving bankrupt economies entitled, Bailouts or Bail-ins? and launched his own consulting firm. In September 2006, he foresaw the end of the real estate bubble: "When supply increases, prices fall: that’s been the trend for 110 years, since 1890. But since 1997, real home prices have increased by about 90 percent. There is no economic fundamental—real income, migration, interest rates, demographics—that can explain this. It means there was a speculative bubble. And now that bubble is bursting."

In the Spring 2006 issue of International Finance, he wrote an article titled "Why Central Banks Should Burst Bubbles" in which he argued that central banks should take action against asset bubbles. When asked whether the real estate ride was over, he said, "Not only is it over, it’s going to be a nasty fall." By May 2009, he felt that analysts expecting the U.S. economy to rebound in the third and fourth quarter were "too optimistic". He expected the full recession to last 24 or 36 months, and believed in the possibility of an "L-shaped" slow recovery that Japan went through in The Lost Decade. In his opinion, much of the current recession's cause is due to "boom-and-bust cycles," and he feels the U.S. economy needs to find a different growth path in the future.

In August 2009, Roubini predicted that the global economy would begin recovering near the end of 2009, but the U.S. economy is likely to grow only about one percent annually during the next two years, which is less than the three percent normal "trend."He noted that the Fed is "now embarked on a policy in which they are in effect directly monetizing about half of the budget deficit," but that as of now "monetization is not inflationary," as banks were holding much of the money themselves and not relending it.

In late May 2010, markets around the world began dropping due partly to problems in Greece and the Eurozone. Roubini explains the new issues governments must deal with: "We have to start to worry about the solvency of governments. What is happening today in Greece is the tip of the iceberg of rising sovereign debt problems in the eurozone, in the UK, in Japan and in the US. This... is going to be the next issue in the global financial crisis."