Nouriel Roubini is gloomy, and it’s not just that he arrived in London on a red-eye flight and couldn’t get a table at Nobu. It’s not even conventional economic worries. It’s everything: a confluence of problems, old and new.
“I think that really the world is on a slow-motion train wreck. There are major new threats that did not exist before, and they’re building up and we’re doing very little about it,” he says.
Roubini is the economist who warned in August 2006 that there was a 70 per cent chance of a US recession, due largely to a housing slump. He was initially dismissed as a crank. Indeed, when you meet him, his unflinching, unsmiling, uncompromising negativity feels like a break with normal human coping mechanisms.
These days pessimism is widespread. To keep his edge, Roubini has turned up his own doom dial to eleven. His book Megathreats is a barrage about negative risks, from inflation to artificial…
