Faces of the Crisis: Nouriel Roubini

n the buzzy, scruffy warren of offices in New York from which Nouriel Roubini runs his economics aggregration and commentary website, one of the young cyber-serfs has taped a New York Post story about the boss to the chalky wall. “NYU Playboy Warns: Econ Party’s Over”, the sub-heading declares, next to a photograph of a smiling, open-shirted Mr Roubini, sandwiched between two attractive young women.

Not so long ago, the phrase “playboy economist” would have been a joky oxymoron, likely to feature in satirical lists alongside “selfless hedge fund manager” and (at least before the US surge in Iraq) “military intelligence”. But, in a sign that practitioners of the dismal science are among the few beneficiaries of the global economic meltdown, this crisis has transformed the 50-year-old New York University professor from a respected academic economist into a minor celebrity.

Mr Roubini, who offered one of the first and most nuanced predictions of the financial and economic crash, is ambivalent about the personal scrutiny his fame has attracted. After Nick Denton, founder of the Gawker website, first pointed to the contrast between the economist’s “Dr Doom” public persona and his party-going private life, Mr Roubini sent Mr Denton a Facebook message in which he declared: “I work very, very hard and I also enjoy life . . . To paraphrase Seinfeld: anything wrong with that?”

But sitting at his modest desk in the corner of an open-plan office, Mr Roubini tells me the “playboy” tag was “a gross mischaracterisation”. He said he was sometimes recognised on the street, but mostly by “geeks and wonks”. “There are not paparazzi yet,” Mr Roubini, wearing jeans, a black jacket and a deep tan that belies the miserable New York weather, says with a self-deprecating chuckle. “No one has said, ‘You have a brilliant mind’, and asked me out.”

He is keener still to debunk the view that he is a “perma-bear” whose prescient forecasts are simply a matter, as one critic has said, of even a stopped clock telling the right time twice a day. Well before his 15 minutes, Mr Roubini had amassed an armoury of intellectual credentials, earning his PhD from Harvard, working in the economics department at Yale and spending two years as a policymaker in Washington, including serving as senior adviser to Tim Geithner, then an undersecretary at the Treasury, and now President-elect Barack Obama’s choice as Treasury chief.

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