Нуриэль Рубини: «Доктор Катастрофа» мировой экономики

Iranian American economist

Nouriel Roubini (nicknamed "Dr. Doom"; born March 29 1958) is a Turkish born Iranian American economic consultant, economist, speaker and writer. He is a Professor Emeritus since 2021 at the Stern School of Business of New York University. Roubini earned a BA in political economics at Bocconi University in Italy and a doctorate in international economics at Harvard University. He was an academic at Yale and a researcher/advisor researching emerging markets. In the 1990s, during the Bill Clinton administration, for one year he was a senior economist in the Council of Economic Advisers.

Roubini was born in Istanbul, Turkey, to Iranian Orthodox Jewish parents. His father was a rug dealer. When he was young, Roubini was expected to go into the rug business himself, and follow in his father’s footsteps. He subsequently attended Bocconi University in Italy, earning a B. A. ('82) summa cum laude in economics; in 2009 he was named Bocconian of the Year. He received a PhD in international economics in 1988 from Harvard University, where his adviser was Jeffrey Sachs. and World Bank (briefly, as a consultant). He cowrote a book on saving bankrupt economies entitled, Bailouts or Bail ins? and started a consulting firm. He said: "One person who has had a great impact on me intellectually was Jeffrey Sachs Another is Larry Summers, the former President of Harvard." Currently, he is a professor emeritus at the Stern School of Business at New York University.

Roubini says that his economic analysis approach is "holistic." Political economist Benjamin Kunkel described his approach as "almost shamanistic." He said: "I've been studying emerging markets for 20 years, and saw the same signs in the U. S. that I saw in them, which was that we were in a massive credit bubble [as 2008 approached]." Roubini's predictions earned him the nicknames "Dr. Doom" and "permabear" (economist slang for someone who continually projects downturns) in the media. In 2008, Fortune magazine wrote, in an article entitled "Eight Who Saw it Coming . and eight who didn't", that in 2005 he had 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 noted 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". However, financial journalist Justin Fox observed in the Harvard Business Review in 2010 that "In fact, Roubini didn't exactly predict the crisis that began in mid 2007 Roubini spent several years predicting a very different sort of crisis — one in which foreign central banks diversifying their holdings out of Treasuries sparked a run on the dollar — only to turn in late 2006 to warning of a U. S. housing bust and a global 'hard landing'. He still didn't give a perfectly clear or (in retrospect) accurate vision of how exactly this would play out I'm more than a little weirded out by the status of prophet that he has been accorded since." Others noted that: "The problem is that even though he was spectacularly right on this one, he went on to predict time and time again, as the markets and the economy recovered in the years following the collapse, that there would be a follow up crisis and that more extreme crashes were inevitable. His calls, after his initial pronouncement, were consistently wrong. Indeed, if you had listened to him, and many investors did, you would have missed the longest bull market run in US market history." Another observed: "For a prophet, he's wrong an awful lot of the time." Tony Robbins wrote: "Roubini warned of a recession in 2004 (wrongly), 2005 (wrongly), 2006 (wrongly), and 2007 (wrongly)" and he "predicted (wrongly) that there'd be a 'significant' stock market correction in 2013." Speaking about Roubini, economist Anirvan Banerji told The New York Times: "Even a stopped clock is right twice a day," and said: "The average time between recessions is about five years So, if you forecast a recession one year and it doesn't happen, and you repeat your forecast year after year at some point the recession will arrive." In March 2009, he predicted the S&P 500 would fall below 600 that year, and possibly plummet to 200. It closed at over 1,115 however, up 24%, the largest single year gain since 2003. Although in April 2009, Roubini prophesied that the United States economy would decline in the final two quarters of 2009, and that the US economy would increase just 0.5% to 1% in 2010, in fact the U. S. economy in each of those six quarters increased at a 2.5% average annual rate. Then in June 2009 he predicted that what he called a "perfect storm" was just around the corner, but no such perfect storm ever appeared. In October 2009 he predicted that the price of gold "can go above $1,000, but it can't move up 20 30%"; he was wrong, as the price of gold rose over the next 18 months, breaking through the $1,000 barrier to over $1,400. In 2012, Roubini predicted that Greece would be ejected from the Eurozone, but that did not happen. The Financial Times observed that in 2020 when the Covid 19 pandemic arrived, he said that policymakers would not mount a large fiscal response. However they did. Also in 2020, he predicted that a US Iran war was likely. By highlighting that certain of his past predictions were accurate, Roubini has promoted himself as a major figure in the U. S. and international debate about the economy, and spent much of his time shuttling between meetings with central bank governors and finance ministers in Europe and Asia. he was No. 4 on Foreign Policy magazine's list of the "top 100 global thinkers." In 2011 and 2012, he was named by the magazine as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers.

In the 1990s, Roubini studied the collapse of emerging economies. He used an intuitive, historical approach backed up by a study of theoretical models and came to the conclusion that a common denominator was the large current account deficits financed by loans from abroad. Roubini theorized that the US might be the next to suffer, and in 2004 began writing about a possible future collapse. In 2004 he said that an upcoming recession would lead to the crash of the dollar; when a few years later a recession did come, it actually strengthened the dollar. In 2005 after Hurricane Katrina hit the US, Roubini predicted that an economic disaster was imminent; however, the next two years instead saw an increase in financial activity. 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 US 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 recession's cause was due to "boom and bust cycles," and he felt the US economy needed to find a different growth path in the future. "We've been growing through a period of time of repeated big bubbles," he said. "We've had a model of 'growth' based on overconsumption and lack of savings. And now that model has broken down because we borrowed too much." He felt that too much human capital went into financing the "most unproductive form of capital, meaning housing" and said he would like to see America create a model of growth in more productive activities. He felt that "sustainable growth may mean investing slowly in infrastructures for the future, and rebuilding our human capital," by investing in renewable resources. "We don't know what it's going to be," he said, "but it's going to be a challenge to find a new growth model. It's not going to be simple." In August 2009, he predicted that the global economy would begin recovering near the end of 2009, but said the US economy was likely to grow only about 1% annually during the next two years, which would have been less than the three percent normal "trend." With regards to Europe, Roubini predicted that Italy, and possibly a series of other Eurozone countries (Portugal, Spain, Greece) might have to exit the eurozone if they did not implement "serious economic reforms." "[It] is not a foregone conclusion but, if Italy does not reform, an exit from EMU within 5 years is not totally unlikely The growth slowdown will make the public deficit and debt worse and potentially unsustainable over time. And if a devaluation cannot be used to reduce real wages, the real exchange rate overvaluation will be undone via a slow and painful process of wage and price deflation."

In 2009 he was named one of the TIME 100, "the annual TIME 100 issue, we do the impossible: name the people who most affect our world." As of January 2009, he remained pessimistic about the U. S. and global economy. He said in September 2008, "we have a subprime financial system, not a subprime mortgage market". "As the U. S. economy shrinks, the entire global economy will go into recession. In Europe, Canada, Japan, and the other advanced economies, it will be severe. Nor will emerging market economies—linked to the developed world by trade in goods, finance, and currency—escape real pain." His pessimism was focused on the short run rather than the medium or long run. At a conference in January 2009 he said the U. S. banking system was "effectively insolvent." He added that the "systemic banking crisis. The problems of Citi, Bank of America and others suggest the system is bankrupt. In Europe, it's the same thing." To deal with this problem, he recommended that the U. S. government "do triage between banks that are illiquid and undercapitalized but solvent, and those that are insolvent. The insolvent ones you have to shut down." He adds, "We're in a war economy. You need command economy allocation of credit to the real economy. Not enough is being done.". In December 2009, as the price of gold exceeded $1,200 an ounce, Roubini said it looked "suspiciously like a bubble." In late May 2010, markets around the world began dropping due partly to problems in Greece and the Eurozone. "Roubini believes Greece will prove to be just the first of a series of countries standing on the brink," wrote the Telegraph. In July 2012, Roubini predicted a global "perfect storm" in 2013, with economies all over the world slowing down or completely halting.

By May 2014, Roubini had become bullish, arguing many of the risks to the global economy had receded. He pointed to an improving European economy and stronger euro, steadying of the economy in Japan, and a marked improvement in the United States. He praised the Federal Reserve for its unconventional monetary policy, which he forecast would last for a few more years, supporting equity markets. At the start of 2017, Roubini speculated that the election of Donald Trump as president might portend a geopolitical shift away from globalization and toward isolationism, which he felt could lead to global instability and rising military conflicts among other countries. Roubini attacked cryptocurrency in remarks to a U. S. Senate Banking Committee in 2018. That year he was a member of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council. In November 2019, he wrote "Nine Reasons Why the Stock Markets Are Far Too Optimistic".

On February 17, 2020, he warned of financial vulnerabilities that "could trigger severe economic, financial, political, and geopolitical disturbances unlike anything since the 2008 crisis." Two days later, the market peaked prior to what would become the 2020 stock market crash. Following a relatively minor decrease, Roubini warned on February 24 that the markets were still too complacent about coronavirus, predicting a government response followed by positive market reaction, which would then fizzle.

He is a frequent critic of cryptocurrencies. He views blockchain as "the byword for a libertarian ideology that treats all governments, central banks, traditional financial institutions, and real world currencies as evil concentrations of power that must be destroyed." He regards cryptocurrencies and blockchain as both utopian and at bottom "about greed" on the part of their promoters. Roubini announced on Twitter in early 2014 his new practice of Transcendental Meditation. Roubini does not want to have children, and cites various global threats as the basis for his position.