Sunday, March 11, 2007

Nouriel Roubini is the new bad boy of international economics -- the academically trained but market-savvy analyst who dares to say what many others only think or fear. The passionate Italian-born economist studied at Harvard, taught at Yale, and worked on international issues in the Clinton White House and the Treasury. And while he's now an associate professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, he's best known for a bearish blog ( http://www.rgemonitor.com/blog/roubini) that has become required reading for global traders, economists, corporate executives and journalists. Roubini has been predicting a recession and a market crisis for so long that many people had begun to think he'd gone off the deep end -- until the past couple of weeks, when credit and equity markets began to unravel and Alan Greenspan was heard to utter the R-word. Now, even economists and policymakers who don't agree with him know they have to test their rosy outlook against Roubini's provocative and entertaining critique.

-- S.P.