Author Archive: Nouriel Roubini

Nouriel Roubini is an economist and university professor. He is widely credited with predicting the sub prime meltdown and subsequent collapse of the housing market. He teaches at New York University's Stern School of Business and performs economic consulting through his firm Roubini Global Economics.


Mr. Roubini was born in Istanbul, Turkey to Jewish-Iranian parents on March 29th, 1959. He grew up in Italy and graduated with a B.A. in economics from Bocconi University in Milan. He continued his studies at Harvard where he obtained a PhD in International Economics in 1988.

After completing his studies, Mr. Roubini spent much of the 1990's performing economic research at Yale while at the same time holding posts as a policy maker at the IMF, World Bank, Federal Reserve and the Bank of Israel.

He joined the Clinton administration in 1998 as senior economist for the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Later he was transferred to Treasury Department where he acted as senior advisor to Timothy Geithner, who at the time was the undersecretary of international affairs.

Mr. Roubini abandoned his post with the U.S. government in 2001 to return to the IMF, where he worked as a visiting scholar as the fund attempted to save Argentina from a financial meltdown. He also founded his economic consultancy firm.

Nouriel Roubini was catapulted to fame during the 2008 housing meltdown sparked by sub prime mortgages, which went on to bring the world financial system to the brink of collapse. As early as 2004 he had been writing about a possible collapse of the US economy. In September 2006 he warned that the spectacular increase in housing prices had created a housing bubble and predicted that basic supply and demand would topple the housing market as developers built more and more houses at inflated prices that consumers would eventually not be able to afford. Most of the financial media wrote off his warnings as inaccurate predictions commonly made by many economists. Indeed, Mr. Roubini was not the only economist warning of a housing bubble.

However, it was Mr. Roubini to whom the media gave credit for the predictions once the housing market imploded and dragged down the world economy with it. He had become an economic seer overnight and his opinions today are highly respected in financial circles. Lately he has been advising central banks to act carefully on monetizing debt and is encouraging governments to develop viable exit strategies to avoid debt monetization from creating inflationary pressures.

His latest predictions warn of a languishing and weak economic recovery as governments continue to run large deficits in an attempt to stimulate economic growth. He believes that the transition from excessive private debt to public debt will be a threat to economic stability and lately has dedicated his efforts to analyzing Europe's sovereign debt crisis.

Mr. Roubini is the author of several books. Today he balances his work between Roubini Global Economics and advising roles with various government agencies and central banks.

Books include:
Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance
Bailouts or Bail-Ins: Responding to Financial Crises in Emerging Markets

Author's Website