On Sept. 7, 2006, Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at New York University, stood before an audience of economists at the International Monetary Fund and announced that a crisis was brewing. In the coming months and years, he warned, 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. He laid out a bleak sequence of events: homeowners defaulting on mortgages, trillions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities unraveling worldwide and the global financial system shuddering to a halt. These developments, he went on, could cripple or destroy hedge funds, investment banks and other major financial institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
8/18/08
Dr. Doom
Last week Peacenik started your week off with a nice little doom and gloom essay by novelist Jim Kuntsler. This week the New York Times' Sunday Magazine presents an interesting profile of one of the masters of doom, Nouriel Roubini. Read this profile and you'll know as much or more about the present and future economic situation than most television economic pundits know. The tv pundits real job is to simply shill for Wall Street and big business.
