Nouriel Roubini

Nouriel Roubini is a professor of Economics and International Business at the Stern School of Business, New York University. He is chairman of RGE Monitor, which provides macroeconomics insights to its clients, through seminars and a top-rated macroeconomics website. He is also an economist for the National Bureau of Economic Research NBER.

Roubini is known for being a "permabear" - an economist who is more likely to predict recession than recovery.

Roubini is most famous for accurately predicting in November 2006 the sub-prime mortgage crisis which occurred in 2007. He became popularly known as "Dr. Doom." He recognized the U.S. bubble from his studies of similar bubbles in Latin America while working for the World Bank in the 1990's. He also predicted some major investment banks would go bankrupt six weeks before Bear Stearns collapsed in March 2008. However, now that his prediction was proven true, his economic predictions have become very influential.

Roubini noticed that most Latin American economies that collapsed during the 1990's had three things in common:

1. Huge current-account deficits.
2. They borrowed from other countries, making them vulnerable to foreign demand for debt repayment.
3. Their banks were poorly regulated and made too many bad loans.

When Roubini saw the same trend happening in the U.S., he knew it was just a question of time.

Throughout the 1990's, Nouriel Roubini worked for the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Federal Reserve, World Bank, and Bank of Israel. His early studies focused on emerging markets. He was a senior economist for the Council of Economic Advisers in 1998 and a senior adviser to (then) Undersecretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner in 1999-2000. He has a B.A. in Political Economics from Bocconi University and a Ph.D. in international economics from Harvard. he began his career in 1988 by teaching at Yale. (Source: NYT, "Dr. Doom," August 15, 2008)