Nouriel Roubini is seriously reconsidering whether he desires to proceed living in Recent York. Mostly because, well, he desires to survive.
“There’s a scenario wherein, in the subsequent twelve months, Russia uses tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine after which they attack NATO and we start a standard war with Russia. The primary nuclear weapon is gonna go to Recent York,” said the 64-year-old NYU economics professor and CEO of Roubini Macro Associates. “Being in Recent York City isn’t protected.”
Even when Manhattan manages to avoid nuclear annihilation, there’s still the opportunity of a natural disaster, like Hurricane Sandy that flooded Recent York in 2012, but “much, much worse,” Roubini told The Post. ”In the subsequent 20 years, most of downtown Recent York is gonna be underwater.”
A recent $52 billion proposal from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which guarantees to construct sea barriers to guard the town from one other storm surge, are impractical, he added, because “Who’s gonna pay for that? They don’t even know if it’s gonna work. It’ll take twenty-five years to construct and even when we save Manhattan, the entire Jersey Shore and Long Island will get flooded because that water must go somewhere.”
You don’t need to talk with Roubini for very long to appreciate why he earned the nickname “Dr. Doom” — a moniker that, along together with his Page Six status for partying with models at hot-tub soirées, has all the time given him a form of supervillain sheen.
He first got here to prominence 16 years ago, accurately predicting the collapse of the housing market and the emergence of a worldwide recession. And now he’s back with a recent book, “MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, And The right way to Survive Them” (Little, Brown), which doubles down on his grim forecasts.
This time, Roubini sees global devastation all over the place, from one other financial crisis (a stagflation — like a recession but worse — is coming before the tip of 2022, and shall be “long and ugly,” he said) to climate change (which Roubini calls a “slow motion train wreck”) to a different pandemic that’ll make COVID’s body count look quaint.
Even together with his status — he’s done nothing to discourage the Dr. Doom moniker — it’s still jarring to listen to Roubini talk, especially when he starts connecting the dots. As he contemplates whether to remain in Recent York, where he resides in a 3,700-square-foot triplex within the East Village, he considers that “an excellent third of the US won’t be habitable in the subsequent 20 years due to climate change.”
The nation’s coasts, he said, will soon be flooded. “Florida’s gonna be underwater — all of it, not only Miami. A lot of the South shall be too hot to live. You’ll have drought from Colorado to California and wildfires like crazy everywhere in the West. We’ll have a fantastic migration to the Midwest, into Canada. We’ll need to take over Canada. Literally.”
As in invade Canada? By military force?
“I’m not joking,” Roubini insisted. “The Canadians are gonna say no but they don’t have the military. They’ve the land and the water, but no army to defend it. Unless they unify with us, everybody’s gonna attempt to take over Canada. They need a well-armed US to guard them, so we’ll turn out to be america of North America just out of necessity. I mean, there was a reason Trump desired to buy Greenland.”
“MegaThreats” follows this same thread of interconnectivity, finding ways in which seemingly unrelated future catastrophes — War! Global warming! Job-stealing robots! — play off of and even feed into one another. The most important unifying principle: There’s not much we are able to do to stop it. A mere seven pages of the book explores how the long run may not end in our extinction.
“This won’t end well,” Roubini concludes in the primary chapter. “We’re in way too deep.”
His outlook has turn out to be much more dismal since ending the book. Last Monday, during an interview for Yahoo Finance’s 2022 All Markets Summit, Roubini claimed that the broader implications of the war in Ukraine implies that “World War III has already began.”
Still, he surprised even himself. “I used to be a bit crazy speaking about World War III, right?” he said with amusing. “I don’t say anything about World War III within the book.”
But his thoughts have evolved since watching the escalating tensions across the globe, whether it’s the conflict in Ukraine, “the US and China being on a collision course [or] all of the little dictators saying, ‘Me too, me too. We’ve got the bomb too! We’d like some attention,’” he said. “It’s a bit pathetic.”
The perfect case scenario, as Roubini sees it, is a return to the economic doldrums and Cold War anxiety of the Seventies.
“That’s if we’re lucky,” he said. “I remember the ’70s and so they were a nightmare. But more realistically, we’re heading right into a period that’s more like what happened between 1918 and 1945, where we got two world wars, nationalistic military regimes, the Spanish flu, total financial collapse and the Holocaust. I’d take the ’70s over that any day.”
When Dr. Doom first began getting headlines for his bleak predictions, he was met with derision and skepticism. When he told an audience of economists on the International Monetary Fund in 2006 that a housing crash and deep recession were inevitable, they laughed. Gawker named Roubini “the Joe Francis of Pessimism Porn” and economist Anirvan Banerjee quipped to the Recent York Times in 2008: “Even a stopped clock is correct twice a day.”
But within the years since, Roubini’s been invited to talk before Congress, the Council on Foreign Relations and the World Economic Forum at Davos. His portending is now called “lucid and nuanced” (by Black Swan investor Nassim Nicholas Taleb) and “sobering and crucial” (by Barry Eichengreen, professor of economics on the University of California, Berkeley).
Roubini doesn’t take the praise an excessive amount of to heart. “I’ve never been all the time right,” he said. “No one’s all the time right. I’m not a fantastic seer of data or anything.” He pauses to think about this. “But more often than not I’m right.”
Born in Istanbul to Iranian-Jewish parents, Roubini had anything but a stable home life. His family moved ceaselessly during his youth, first to Tehran, Iran, when he was 2, then to Tel Aviv, Israel when he was 3, and eventually settling in Milan, Italy, when he was 6. Removed from finding it traumatizing, Roubini enjoyed the transient existence a lot that today he calls himself a “global nomad,” spending more time on planes than in a single city. (He’s single and childless.)
He was, nevertheless, the black sheep of his family, which incorporates two younger brothers and a sister, having declined to follow his father’s footsteps into the wholesale rug import-export business. As an alternative, he went on to check economics in Milan and later Harvard. He also had no real interest in Orthodox Judaism, although he did learn to talk Hebrew to converse with relatives in Israel (that is as well as o Italian, English and Farsi, the Western Iranian language spoken by his parents at home.)
Roubini looks back at his childhood as a carefree time, no less than in comparison with today.
“After I was growing up, climate change didn’t exist as a priority yet,” he said. “No one talked about natural resources or superstorms, and the last major global pandemic was in 1918, in order that wasn’t a priority. I knew that if I worked and studied hard, I may very well be anything: a lawyer, an engineer, a banker, a factory employee. And I didn’t need to worry about being displaced by artificial intelligence. We lived in a stable democracy, without extremist political parties. There was some division between right and left, but nothing just like the politicization we’ve got today. No one was talking a couple of potential civil war within the US or a violent secession.”
Even when the world began to shift, and Roubini was among the many first to set off the alarm bells that humankind was spiraling towards certain doom, he didn’t retreat to some underground bunker, bracing himself for the tip. As an alternative, Dr. Doom earned a recent nickname — the Economist Playboy.
After he became a minor celebrity in his early 50s, Roubini ended up within the gossip pages as often because the financial report. He vacationed with George Soros and hosted wild parties at his $5.5 million Recent York loft, decorated with vulva wall art designed by artist Analia Segal. As he bragged to Recent York Magazine in 2009, most nights he was surrounded by women who “love my beautiful mind … I’m a rock star amongst geeks, wonks and nerds.”
The closest Roubini got here to actual catastrophe was when the town forced him to remove his private hot tub, large enough to carry 10 models, in 2013.
The country was fighting a recession, but as Roubini gloated, “The recession has been great for me.”
Even last 12 months, Roubini still gave the impression to be having fun, telling the Recent York Times that he’s been feeling “reasonably optimistic,” and showing off his trimmed-down physique from a recent regime of eating regimen and exercise.
“I lost 35 kilos,” he announced proudly. Not exactly behavior you’d expect from anyone who was, on the time, writing a book with sentences like, “Calamity seems near certain. Expect many dark days, my friends.”
Roubini prefers the nickname Dr. Realist over Dr. Doom. He’s not a fatalist, he said, just anyone trying to the long run with eyes wide open, and considering how it would affect him.
“It’s not only working-class blue collar jobs which are at risk of being replaced by robotic automation,” he said. “My job as an economist attempting to predict the Fed, in 10 years, AI is gonna do it higher than me. They’re gonna take all the information, every speech of each Fed official, and so they’re gonna provide you with a prediction of the subsequent Fed decision. And the nuance shall be much better than what I’m capable of provide. Like everybody, I’m heading towards irrelevance.”
But can anything be done? “I’m unsure persons are gonna do anything,” he said. “We don’t need to sacrifice today for the sake of our kids and future generations. So we discount the long run hoping that technology will resolve this problem by some miracle.”
So why, then, doesn’t he just retreat to Canada now?
“There’s loads of farmland across the border in Canada,” he conceded. “Nevertheless it’s not nearly growing your personal food and having your personal cows pasturing and your personal water resources. You furthermore may need security, because everybody’s gonna need to go there. And I’ve never used a gun in my life.”
For all of Roubini’s speak about a “nightmare for humanity” and never having much faith that “people will ever listen,” there’s no less than some a part of him that believes in a comfortable ending.
“I believe young persons are hearing the message,” he said. “I’ll be dead in 30 years, but they’re those who really have probably the most to lose. Hopefully there’ll be a movement, an rebellion against what’s coming. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Republican or Democrats — these threats are far more severe than our petty partisan debates. That is about whether the human species goes to survive and thrive or we’re gonna sink.”
And if we sink, he said, “we sink together, and we drown together. We’re all in the identical boat. We will watch the boat fill with water, or we are able to work together to do something about it.”