Nouriel Roubini

Nouriel Roubini (nicknamed "Dr. Doom"; born March 29 1958) is a Turkish-born Iranian-American economic consultant, economist, 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.

From 1962 when he was five years old to 1983 he lived in Italy, primarily in Milan, where he attended the local Jewish school.

He later attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel for one year, in 1976-77.

He received a PhD in international economics in 1988 from Harvard University, where his adviser was Jeffrey Sachs.

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.

When he was a year old, his family lived briefly in Tehran, Iran.

When he was three years old, the family moved to Tel Aviv, Israel; he still has family in Israel.

For much of the 1990s, Roubini taught at Yale and then in New York, while also working for stints at the International Monetary Fund (briefly, as a summer intern and visiting scholar), and World Bank (briefly, as a consultant).

In 1998-99, he worked for one year in the Clinton administration as a senior economist in the Council of Economic Advisers.

He worked from July to October 1999 at the Treasury Department as a senior adviser to Timothy Geithner (who was then the undersecretary for international affairs), and from October 1999 to June 2020 as director of its Office of Policy Development and Review.

Roubini returned to the IMF for July through August 2001 as a visiting scholar.

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."

Rather than focus on mathematical models and formulas, he draws his ideas from a combination of history, literature, and international politics, what he calls the "entire enchilada."

He also described his approach at an International Monetary Fund meeting, when discussing how he arrived at the percentage likelihood that there would be a recession, by saying: "If you ask me where I got that number: Just out of my nose. I will be very honest about that... my model is like a 'smell test'."

Political economist Benjamin Kunkel described his approach as "almost shamanistic."

Journalist Julia Ioffe observed "Roubini-ism-- [is] sprawling, non-linear, and hypercaffeinated-- ... his talking points are ... pluralized, rushing out quickly, like a magician's scarves ...."

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."

Economist Nariman Behravesh said: "Nouriel Roubini has been singing the doom-and-gloom story for 10 years. Eventually something was going to be right."

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".

Roubini was one of the people, along with among others economists Dean Baker, Fred Harrison, Raghuram Rajan, Stephen Roach, and William White, analyst Meredith Whitney, investment advisers Gary Shilling, Peter Schiff, and Marc Faber, and CFTC chair Brooksley Born who predicted the crash of 2007–08.

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".

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.

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman added in 2009 that his once "seemingly outlandish" predictions were matched "or even exceeded by reality."

In January 2009, Roubini predicted that oil prices would stay below $40 for all of 2009.

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."