Dr. Doom

The NYTimes Magazine has an interesting profile on Nouriel Roubini, economist at NYU, and founder of RGE Monitor. Roubini has an interesting background but it notable for having emphasized the likelihood of a financial crisis and knock-on effects on the economy for quite a while.

See also Krugman's note that corrects some of the misleading journalistic discussion of the article. As Krugman notes, financial crises are hardly an unstudied area in economics as the NYTimes article asserts. I even teach a class on financial crisies.

One also has to take issue with the idea that it is the absence of equations that characterizes good work on crises. The important point is to study the problem, there are plenty of good papers that study crises that develop interesting models. Without them we really do not understand what we are talking about.