Quotes from Nouriel Roubini

I believe investors should invest for the long run, so I don't buy and sell. I usually maintain the classic index of global equities, diversified U.S. and global and emerging markets, and when the risk is larger, I diminish the amount in global equities and put more into liquid assets - but very irregularly.

My family is a Jewish Iranian family, but I was born in Turkey and raised in Italy. So it's a very mixed background.

I am quite international. My background, born in Turkey. My family is a Jewish family from Iran, so I went from Turkey to Iran to Israel, and then grew up in Italy and ended up in U.S. for graduate school. So I tend to look at things from an international perspective, and I think that gives you a little bit of a broader view of what's going on.

Among the social media - I've tried them all - Facebook is a bit of a game, but Twitter is a productivity tool. I use it regularly and I'm addicted to it.

For me, geopolitical issues are becoming more important, because how can you understand economy if you don't understand geopolitics? People think economists just deal with spreadsheets and charts. That's a narrow-minded caricature.

I'm a rock star among geeks, wonks, and nerds.

I believe, unlike people that are totally free-market, laissez-faire fundamentalists, that there is an important role that the government can play - one, in providing public goods, whether it's education, health care, or other things, and two, supervising countercyclical policy - stimulus, whether it's monetary, fiscal, or otherwise.

Having spent 10 years studying emerging markets, I know that you have patterns repeated over and over again. A bubble is like a fire which needs oxygen to continue... when you see there is no oxygen, things change.

I am not going to say I told you so, but I did.

The party will go on until reckless speculation becomes unsustainable, ending with the inevitable collapse in bullish sentiment, a phenomenon called a Minsky moment, named for economist Hyman Minsky. It's what happens when market watchers suddenly begin to wake up and worry about irrational exuberance. Once their sentiment changes, a crash is inevitable as an asset and credit bubble and boom goes into a bust.

Energy prices in the Goldman Sachs Commodities Index soared almost 60 percent in 2021 as supply lagged behind demand.49 Pressure on institutional investors from eco-minded shareholders has slashed investment in new fossil fuel projects by 40 percent, according to one estimate.

What about our looming financial crises? Innovation can solve many problems, but it won't erase unsustainable debt. We have borrowed our way to prosperity with no exit strategy. Loans secured with home equity and other assets lifted consumption in the 2000s as income growth slowed. Dimming prospects of repayment did not deter lenders who preyed on increasingly desperate consumers and homeowners. Behavior that fueled the 2008 financial bubble and bust will persist, but on steroids.

It's a classic bias in human thinking: most of us never want to imagine the worst. We are optimists by nature. Personally, I find the zeitgeist at Davos every year to be a contrarian indicator of the future. If everyone in the Davos set believes something will happen—good or bad, as it may be—they are highly likely to be wrong.

When the debt bills come due, governments have no good options. The kinds of harsh remedies available—devaluing currencies and cutting off the social safety net, for example—often lead to all manner of unintended consequences, including market crashes, authoritarian populism, and even the quiet sale of missile and nuclear technologies to the highest rogue bidders.

The coming tsunami will not spare China, where credit-fueled economic growth has built a Himalayan mountain of debt, about 330 percent of GDP.

Borrowing to invest can make good sense as long as the return on the investment is higher than the cost of financing it. Borrowing to consume, on the other hand, uses debt to plug recurring bills or deficits that operating income should cover. Experience teaches prudent public and private borrowers a golden rule: borrow to invest, not to consume.

A boom-and-bust pattern has been well chronicled since the publication of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds in 1841. In it, Scottish author Charles Mackay probed the human tendency to run amok in pursuit of quick profits, dating back to a mania for tulip bulbs as expensive as houses in seventeenth-century Holland.

These economies featured high savings and prudent fiscal authorities. Dubbed the Asian Tigers, South Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand were touted as models of economic transformation. They nurtured a cadre of dynamic companies with global reach—but as it turned out, those companies were fueling their own growth with massive levels of debt, often in foreign currency. Private debt can be just as destructive, if not more so, than public debt.

Recall the 1970s, a decade that featured bubbles, busts, an end to the global gold exchange standard, devaluation of the dollar, mounting debt, risky financial innovation, monetary and fiscal experimentation, and oil supply shocks driven by geopolitical shocks. It all culminated in double-digit inflation, stubborn unemployment, and persistent recession. That is the corrosive condition known as stagflation, or stagnation with inflation.

The bottom line, says Rodrik, is that freer immigration has a much more positive net impact on global domestic product than liberalizing trade, movements of capital, or financial services.

According to standard economic theory, free trade helps global welfare. The same is true for free trade in people, via open-border immigration policies.

replacing brainpower is different from replacing muscle power. Good jobs that emerged from the decline of manufacturing and rise of services required brains, not brawn. "Knowledge worker" was the category that everyone wanted to join. But now we have lost our monopoly on knowledge. Artificial intelligence can handle desirable jobs better and faster than human brains can handle them. There will be jobs for people, but who will want them?

Bailouts of insolvent agents cannot restore economic health any more than two sober friends make a drunk friend sober by standing him upright: socializing unsustainable private debts often leads to unsustainable public debts.

Even the cost of commodities necessary for renewable energy—like lithium and copper—will sharply rise as the price of fossil fuels skyrockets, a phenomenon dubbed greenflation. Supply chains that depend on fossil fuels will strain to keep goods moving. Shortages will proliferate.