Faces of the Crisis: Nouriel Roubini

Faces of the Crisis: Nouriel Roubini

By Chrystia Freeland

Published: December 26 2008 20:16 | Last updated: December 26 2008 20:16

In the buzzy, scruffy warren of offices in New York from which Nouriel Roubini runs his economics aggregration and commentary website, one of the young cyber-serfs has taped a New York Post story about the boss to the chalky wall. “NYU Playboy Warns: Econ Party’s Over”, the sub-heading declares, next to a photograph of a smiling, open-shirted Mr Roubini, sandwiched between two attractive young women.

Not so long ago, the phrase “playboy economist” would have been a joky oxymoron, likely to feature in satirical lists alongside “selfless hedge fund manager” and (at least before the US surge in Iraq) “military intelligence”. But, in a sign that practitioners of the dismal science are among the few beneficiaries of the global economic meltdown, this crisis has transformed the 50-year-old New York University professor from a respected academic economist into a minor celebrity.

Mr Roubini, who offered one of the first and most nuanced predictions of the financial and economic crash, is ambivalent about the personal scrutiny his fame has attracted. After Nick Denton, founder of the Gawker website, first pointed to the contrast between the economist’s “Dr Doom” public persona and his party-going private life, Mr Roubini sent Mr Denton a Facebook message in which he declared: “I work very, very hard and I also enjoy life . . . To paraphrase Seinfeld: anything wrong with that?”

But sitting at his modest desk in the corner of an open-plan office, Mr Roubini tells me the “playboy” tag was “a gross mischaracterisation”. He said he was sometimes recognised on the street, but mostly by “geeks and wonks”. “There are not paparazzi yet,” Mr Roubini, wearing jeans, a black jacket and a deep tan that belies the miserable New York weather, says with a self-deprecating chuckle. “No one has said, ‘You have a brilliant mind’, and asked me out.”

He is keener still to debunk the view that he is a “perma-bear” whose prescient forecasts are simply a matter, as one critic has said, of even a stopped clock telling the right time twice a day. Well before his 15 minutes, Mr Roubini had amassed an armoury of intellectual credentials, earning his PhD from Harvard, working in the economics department at Yale and spending two years as a policymaker in Washington, including serving as senior adviser to Tim Geithner, then an undersecretary at the Treasury, and now President-elect Barack Obama’s choice as Treasury chief.

Moreover, Mr Roubini says it was economic analysis, rather than a gloomy cast of mind – he describes himself as a cheerful pragmatist – that inspired his bleak predictions. “This crisis was not a Black Swan event,” he argues, citing Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book on the importance of the extreme and the unknowable. “It was more of a generalised asset and credit bubble throughout the economy . . . But whenever you are in the middle of a bubble people find ways to justify the asset prices.”

Mr Roubini’s fans – particularly in the business world, where he is now in high demand – agree. “He’s been the most right of all the economists around,” fund manager and philanthropist George Soros says. Lawrence Summers, the incoming head of Mr Obama’s National Economic Council, who was Mr Roubini’s ultimate boss at the Treasury and who has been an adviser to his website, said this autumn: “Nouriel’s great virtue is that he was right. A lot of stuff that he laid out that people thought was nuts has happened, so I give him credit.”

Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive of asset-manager Pimco, describes Mr Roubini as “brilliant” and a favourite intellectual combatant because “he is not shy to engage in discussions”. Mr El-Erian says Mr Roubini first started to develop a following in the investing community at the beginning of this decade when his website, RGE Monitor, became more widely known: “He started to look at these negative feedback loops in the economy earlier and more than anyone else I know.” Pimco rated him highly enough that in 2004 the California-based company invited him to a special meeting of its investment committee.

One of his strengths, according to Mr El-Erian, is his willingness “to think outside the box”. That iconoclasm may stem in part from Mr Roubini’s peripatetic biography. Born in Istanbul to Iranian-Jewish parents, as a preschooler he moved with his family to Tehran and Tel Aviv, before they settled in Milan when he was five. He grew up speaking Farsi at home with his parents, Italian at school, Hebrew on frequent visits to his relatives in Israel, where his parents still maintain a home, and English as his education progressed. He is now a US citizen and a resident of New York’s trendy Tribeca area. He has never married.

He describes his upbringing as that of “a true international economist”. As a self-described “global nomad”, he simultaneously feels at ease almost everywhere but never fully assimilated anywhere.

That perspective, and his youthful experience of societies in transition, helped him to see a continuity between the emerging market crises he analysed in Bailouts or Bail-ins, the 2004 book he wrote with economist Brad Setser, and looming problems in the US.

“It was almost like a natural continuation of my interest in emerging markets,” he says. “I saw that the US had very large twin deficits, a housing boom, I saw the private sector excesses . . . There were things in the US that could delay the crisis but not prevent it.”

It is a parallel that may seem obvious today. But back in the days of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History theory, US exceptionalism and free-market triumphalism, Mr Roubini’s was definitely a minority view.

Although his former bosses from the Clinton Treasury are going back to Washington next month, he says the role of outside oracle suits him best. Like his carpet-importing father, Mr Roubini is an avid entrepreneur, as enthusiastic about the prospects for his website – he boasts about his 40 employees and offices in Hong Kong and New York – as he is about economics.

As for the future, he warns that 2009 will probably be the worst year: “I expect a global recession and a very severe one.” But he promises not to be an eternal pessimist: “In the medium term, the integration of India and China is a boon for the global economy and I think the US can fix its market, too. Maybe one day Dr Doom can become Dr Boom.”

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