Nouriel Roubini #12 on Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers
12. Nouriel Roubini — for seeing the roots of the next crisis in the current one.
Economist | New York
Foreign Policy — Being a global economic Cassandra isn’t a cheerful job, but someone’s got to do it — and Nouriel Roubini acknowledges that he fits the role perfectly. He has even embraced the moniker “Dr. Doom,” a name derisively pinned on him before the 2008 crash that showed his pessimism was warranted. And so while everyone’s still trying to figure out how to overcome the last financial crisis, Roubini has his sights set firmly on the next one — which, Dr. Doom assures us in his book, Crisis Economics, won’t latest be too far off.
Roubini argues that the United States is at serious risk of heading back into a recession, and unlike other talking heads, he puts a number on his prediction, saying there’s a 40 percent chance of the United States hitting the dreaded “double dip.” Why? He thinks the root causes of the current malaise have only been covered over and that unhealthy levels of debt are once again piling up around the world — though this time on government accounting ledgers. It’s only a matter of time, he says, until we start seeing national bankruptcies — perhaps even a cascade of them across Europe that sparks the dissolution of the euro. If Roubini has one message, it’s that crises aren’t unforeseeable “black swan” events, but “white swans” — the culmination of long trends that are perfectly intelligible to anyone who takes the time to examine the data. We may not like Dr. Doom’s advice, but we can’t say he didn’t warn us.
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