Nouriel Roubini

Jerome Favre/Bloomberg

Nouriel Roubini

Professor of Economics, New York University
U.S.

Born in Turkey and raised in Iran, Israel, and Italy, Roubini has lived in the U.S. for two decades and teaches international economics at the Stern School of Management at NYU. He made his name by predicting the U.S. real estate bubble and subsequent global economic crisis long before many of his peers, which earned him derision at the time as a Cassandra but has now turned him into something of a celebrity. Roubini continues to be fairly bearish on the economy. At a Davos panel session Jan. 27 he expressed concern over the rate of the recovery, praised President Obama's new proposals for bank regulations, and said the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which had separated commercial and investment banking, was a "mistake." In a later interview with Bloomberg TV, he also said he has never been so pessimistic about the future of the European monetary union.