Who is he: Nouriel Roubini is the cofounder and chairman of Roubini Global Economics, an independent, global macroeconomic and market strategy research firm. The firm's website is at Roubini.com, which offers articles by Roubini and others, interactive live sessions and market strategy advice for paid subscribers.
Roubini is a professor of economics at New York University's Stern School of Business and from 1998 to 2000, he served as the senior economist for international affairs on the White House Council of Economic Advisors and then became the senior advisor to the undersecretary for international affairs at the US Treasury Department.
Roubini has published over 70 theoretical, empirical and policy papers on international macroeconomic issues and coauthored numerous books. Roubini's views on global economic issues are widely cited by the media, and he is a frequent commentator on various business news programs. Roubini received an undergraduate degree at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy, and a doctorate in economics at Harvard University.
Dr. Roubini is known as "Dr. Doom" for his frank and negative assessments about what is going on in the world's economy. However, in a late 2011 posting at Reuters, Roubini revealed that when it comes to prescribing solutions to the current economic crisis he is an outright Keynesian.
Almost everything Roubini has proposed has involved massive government action. Roubini basically wanted governments, in the EU, especially, to forgive massive amounts of debt in every sector while embarking on pan-regional make-work programs that include the creation of infrastructure and green jobs. Roubini suggested central banks flood the world with cheap liquidity that would allow businesses to borrow and banks to recapitalize.
At the end of the article, Roubini even claimed that if his prescriptions were not followed – if radical Keynesian/Fabian solutions are not implemented – that the result would be renewed authoritarianism and war. Not from Roubini, apparently, will there be any fundamental criticism of the system.
Rather than explaining how the West's central banking economies have brought only destruction and ruin on a cyclical basis (see business cycle), Dr. Doom wants those same central banks to print even MORE money. This will guarantee there is enough "liquidity" to fool people once again into equating fiat currency with wealth, when it is nothing but a distortive price fixing that ruins commerce and bankrupts small businesses.
Dr. Doom is, after all, a kind of radical Keynesian. Roubini's reputation as an out-of-the-box "rogue" thinker is a public relations ploy.
Background: Nouriel Roubini, born 29 March 1959 in Istanbul, Turkey to Iranian Jewish parents. As a young child his family moved to Italy where he lived until receiving a BA in political economics, summa cum laude, at Milan's Bocconi University in 1983. He followed that with a Ph.D. in international economics from Harvard University. Thereafter he worked teaching at Yale and at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Federal Reserve, the World Bank and Bank of Israel.
During the administration of President Bill Clinton, Roubini was a senior economist for the Council of Economic Advisers and then a senior adviser to Timothy Geithner, who was later appointed US Treasury Secretary. He credits his Harvard mentor, Jeffrey Sachs, and Larry Summers, for whom he worked in Clinton's Treasury Department, for their influence on his understanding of economics. Roubini's economic views and predictions provided him with nicknames such as "Dr. Doom" and "permabear."