[edit] Economic forecast
[edit] U.S. economy
In the 1990s, Roubini studied the collapse of emerging economies. He used an intuitive, historical approach backed up by an understanding of theoretical models to analyze these countries and came to the conclusion that a common denominator was the large current account deficits financed by loans from abroad. Roubini theorized that the United States might be the next to suffer, and as early as 2004 began writing about a possible future collapse.[2] Business Week magazine writer Michael Mandel, however, noted in 2006 that Roubini and other economists often make general predictions which could happen over multi-year periods.[10]
In September 2006, he saw the end of the real estate bubble: "When supply increases, prices fall: That’s been the trend for 110 years, since 1890. But since 1997, real home prices have increased by about 90 percent. There is no economic fundamental—real income, migration, interest rates, demographics—that can explain this. It means there was a speculative bubble. And now that bubble is bursting." In the Spring 2006 issue of International Finance, he wrote an article titled "Why Central Banks Should Burst Bubbles"[11] in which he argued that central banks should take action against asset bubbles. When asked whether the real estate ride was over, he said, "Not only is it over, it’s going to be a nasty fall."[12]
By May 2009, he felt that analysts expecting the U.S. economy to rebound in the third and fourth quarter were "too optimistic." He stated, "Certainly the rate of economic contraction is slowing down from the freefall of the last two quarters." He expects negative growth to the end of 2009, and feels that during 2010 the recovery is still going to be weak,"[13] with the full recession lasting 24 or 36 months, and a possibility of an "L-shaped" slow recovery that Japan went through in The Lost Decade.[14] But in fact, the US economy started to grow in mid 2009 just like the optimistic analysts forecasted.[15]
In his opinion, much of the current recession's cause is due to "boom-and-bust cycles," and feels the U.S. economy needs to find a different growth path in the future. "We’ve been growing through a period of time of repeated big bubbles," he said. "We’ve had a model of 'growth' based on overconsumption and lack of savings. And now that model has broken down because we borrowed too much." He feels that too much human capital went into financing the "most unproductive form of capital, meaning housing" and would like to see America create a model of growth in more-productive activities. He feels that "sustainable growth may mean investing slowly in infrastructures for the future, and rebuilding our human capital," by investing in renewable resources. "We don’t know what it’s going to be," he says, "but it’s going to be a challenge to find a new growth model. It’s not going to be simple."[16]
Recovery from recession
In August 2009, Roubini predicted that the global economy will begin recovering near the end of 2009, but the U.S. economy is likely to grow only about 1 percent annually during the next two years, which is less than the 3 percent normal "trend."[17] He notes that the Fed is "now embarked on a policy in which they are in effect directly monetizing about half of the budget deficit," but that as of now "monetization is not inflationary," as banks are holding much of the money themselves and not relending it. At some point, however, probably by 2011, he sees the recession ending, and "banks will want to lend the money; people and businesses will want to borrow and spend it." Then it will be time for an "exit strategy, of mopping up that liquidity" and taking some of the money back out of circulation, "so it doesn’t just bid up house prices and stock values in a new bubble. And that will be 'very, very tricky indeed,'" he states.[16] However this prediction proved to be wrong when the US economy grew 2.2% in the third quarter of 2009, and contracted only 0.7% in the second quarter of 2009, showing that the economy is recovering earlier and much more robustly than Roubini expected.[15]
Also, in late July, he warned that if no clear exit strategy is outlined and implemented, there was the potential of a perfect storm: fiscal deficits, rising bond yields, higher oil prices, weak profits, and a stagnant labor market, which combined could "blow the recovering world economy back into a double-dip recession."[17]
[edit] Global economy
[edit] 2009
As of January 2009, he remained pessimistic about the U.S. and global economy. He said in September, 2008, "we have a subprime financial system, not a subprime mortgage market".[18] "As the U.S. economy shrinks, the entire global economy will go into recession. In Europe, Canada, Japan, and the other advanced economies, it will be severe. Nor will emerging market economies—linked to the developed world by trade in goods, finance, and currency—escape real pain."[19] He was quoted in South Africa's 2009 budget speech for his role in predicting the current financial crisis in the developed markets.
Roubini notes that the subprime issues are a global, and not just a U.S. problem. In an interview with author James Fallows in late spring of 2009, he stated, "People talk about the American subprime problem, but there were housing bubbles in the U.K., in Spain, in Ireland, in Iceland, in a large part of emerging Europe, like the Baltics all the way to Hungary and the Balkans. It was not just the U.S., and not just 'subprime.' It was excesses that led to the risk of a tipping point in many different economies."[16]
His pessimism is focused on the short-run rather than the medium or long-run.[2] In Foreign Policy (Jan/Feb 2009), he writes, "Last year’s worst-case scenarios came true. The global financial pandemic that I and others had warned about is now upon us. But we are still only in the early stages of this crisis. My predictions for the coming year, unfortunately, are even more dire: The bubbles, and there were many, have only begun to burst".[19]
At a conference in Dubai in January, 2009, he said, the U.S. banking system was "effectively insolvent." He added that the "systemic banking crisis.... The problems of Citi, Bank of America and others suggest the system is bankrupt. In Europe, it’s the same thing."[20] To deal with this problem, he recommends that the U.S. government "do triage between banks that are illiquid and undercapitalized but solvent, and those that are insolvent. The insolvent ones you have to shut down." He adds, "We're in a war economy. You need command-economy allocation of credit to the real economy. Not enough is being done," he felt at the time.[21]
[edit] 2010
In 2010, he again warned that despite an improved economy with rising stock markets, the crisis was not over and new bubbles were on the horizon:
"We are just at the next stage. This is where we move from a private to a public debt problem . . . We socialised part of the private losses by bailing out financial institutions and providing fiscal stimulus to avoid the great recession from turning into a depression. But rising public debt is never a free lunch, eventually you have to pay for it."[22]
In late May 2010, markets around the world began dropping due partly to problems in Greece and the Eurozone. "Roubini believes Greece will prove to be just the first of a series of countries standing on the brink," writes the Telegraph.[22] Roubini explains the new issues governments must deal with:
"We have to start to worry about the solvency of governments. What is happening today in Greece is the tip of the iceberg of rising sovereign debt problems in the eurozone, in the UK, in Japan and in the US. This... is going to be the next issue in the global financial crisis."[22]
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