“We socialized 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.”

By Jonathan Sibun at Times UK

Just three years earlier, Roubini had been the object of derision in the economics community as he prophesied a US housing market crash, financial crisis and partial collapse of the banking sector. Today, as an adviser to governments and central bankers and much feted in the media, he’s well aware of the power of being right.

“In my line of business your reputation is based on being right,” he says. “The publicity is just noise. Certainly with a global crisis, the dismal scientists are having some prominence, even if most of the economics profession actually failed to predict it.”

The 51-year-old, widely known as Dr Doom, is in town to publicise his new book Crisis Economics, a crash course in the financial crisis and what can be done to avoid another.

The book does little to suggest he is uncomfortable with his nickname. Where Roubini is concerned, the great recession has some way to run.

“The crisis is not over; we are just at the next stage. This is where we move from a private to a public debt problem,” he says, his speech the mongrel drawl of a man who was born in Turkey to Iranian parents, raised in Israel and Italy and lives in New York. “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.”

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