8/18/2011 - Global recession risk now greater than 50%: Roubini

Economist Nouriel Roubini says the risk of a global recession is greater than 50 percent, and the next two to three months will reveal the economy’s direction. In an interview with WSJ’s Simon Constable, Roubini also says he’s putting his money in cash. “This is not the time to be in risky assets,” he says.

You can see that Nouriel Roubini is once again using his “they were wrong, I was right” strawman argument to make himself more important and appear more clever than he is.
First of all, he was not the only person that predicted the housing bubble bust, the stock market correction or even a US-lead global recession.
Many also did not buy the decoupling argument. And not everyone was in the ‘U’ or ‘V’ shaped recession camps. There were also many of us that argued that an unwinding of global imbalances would create an ‘L’ or ‘W’ shaped recovery in the real economy once the financial crisis was over. Or as we called it a saw-toothed recovery.
Many swear that Roubini is as bad as Krugman when it comes time to taking all the credit for everything was his idea and no one else gets it. Even when you can read the many articles of those who raised these issues before they stumbled on them.
What egos! Academic egg heads. What is the saying? The battles are so pitched because the stakes are so small? I don’t mean the outcome for the global economy, which is the real issue, but their stake in defending their own reputations and shouting down those that dare disagree with them.

On the other side of the coin, it’s long past the happy-talk ‘recession’ phase in the US; into 13th quarter of contraction, and that a little more than a cyclical recession. No one believes the phoney GDP numbers given the massive currency printing.
A jobless recovery is more honestly called a depression, even moreso given the 30 year trajectory of wage compression. The more objective measures of the US fiscal gap is $200 trillion, and Canadian situation is proportionally excessive when you throw in the mortgage risk transferred to the taxpayers at CHMC, and CPP and other long term commitments.
After the US housing blowout, the bubbles in Canada and Australia are on track to do the big snap-crackle-pop in due course. Few people think there is low inflation, and some are that waiting with cash in hand to deploy to narcissistic nirvana pursuits and portfolio balancing games, from your laptop at ‘the’ cottage.
Good luck with the rosy real estate 3-d glasses, and avoidance of all inconvenient truths. Of course you have already taken care of the cottage in ‘the’ estate plan with that huge UL insurance policy.





http://www.thecomingdepression.net/media/video/global-recession-risk-now-greater-than-50-roubini/