Nouriel Roubini

Nouriel Roubini (born March 28, 1959) is an American economist. He anticipated the collapse of the United States housing market and the worldwide recession which started in 2008 and ended in 2009. He teaches at New York University's Stern School of Business and is the chairman of Roubini Global Economics, an economic consultancy firm.

The child of Iranian Jews, he grew up in Italy. After receiving a BA in political economics at Bocconi University, Milan and a doctorate in international economics at Harvard University, 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's critical and consistently bearish economic views have earned him the nicknames "Dr. Doom" and "permabear" in the media. In 2008, Fortune magazine wrote, "In 2005 Roubini said home prices were riding a speculative wave that would soon sink the economy. Back then the professor was called a Cassandra. Now he's a sage". The New York Times notes that he foresaw "homeowners defaulting on mortgages, trillions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities unraveling worldwide and the global financial system shuddering to a halt". In September 2006, he warned a skeptical IMF that "the United States was likely to face a once-in-a-lifetime housing bust, an oil shock, sharply declining consumer confidence, and, ultimately, a deep recession". Nobel laureate Paul Krugman adds that his once "seemingly outlandish" predictions have been matched "or even exceeded by reality."

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. Although he is ranked only 512th in terms of lifetime academic citations, he was #4 on Foreign Policy magazine's list of the "top 100 global thinkers." In 2011 and 2012, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers. He has appeared before Congress, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the World Economic Forum at Davos.

Read more about Nouriel Roubini:  Early Life and Education, Career, Writings, Research, Current Appointments