"The Prime of Mr. Nouriel Roubini" (Hit Piece on Roubini..as Dr. Doom/Playboy)

[KoKo]

The Prime of Mr. Nouriel Roubini
by Helaine Olen April 2009 Issue

Life is good for New York University’s party-boy economist. Once regarded as a crank, he has parlayed his now-accurate predictions of an economic bust into fame, rising fortune, and a vigorous social life. But is the recession’s “Doctor Doom” just a one-hit wonder?
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It’s Saturday night. A stream of young fashionistas and other assorted Manhattan scenesters pours into a fashionable Tribeca building. They’re all headed for the loft of a middle-aged economist—a man whose name would hardly have registered with anyone but the most obsessive CNBC watcher a few years ago. A doorman on duty surveys the scene and rolls his eyes. “Another Roubini party,” he mutters.

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The host of the hour, Nouriel Roubini—the New York University professor credited with calling the current economic collapse and a ubiquitous presence on financial-news shows who continues to forecast gloom and doom—is looking positively upbeat this evening. He greets guest after guest with a kiss on both cheeks as music thumps at a volume loud enough to irritate the neighbors. Suspended from the ceiling, above the throngs of minglers, are dozens of small glass globes, resembling nothing so much as bubbles.

The decor is apt. As early as 2004, when other economists were proclaiming a new financial age, Roubini was predicting that the bubble buoying the United States economy was about to pop. At the time, he was derided as a crank. His downbeat message, combined with an accent reminiscent of a James Bond villain and a laugh that seems to kick in on a one-second tape delay, quickly earned him the sobriquet Doctor Doom.

Now the ridicule has turned into respect, not to mention countless TV appearances, speaking engagements, invitations to testify before Congress, new clients for the consulting firm he runs, and parties packed with young, beautiful admirers. But as the world searches desperately for signs of recovery, Doctor Doom faces his own potential doomsday scenario: If the economy turns up, he could go down as nothing more than a one-hit wonder. Unless he nails it again.

That might be tough. Not only has Roubini been a professional downer for years, his reasoning has frequently been off. He first predicted, incorrectly, that there would be a bust as a result of Hurricane Katrina, and later, again incorrectly, that the economy would tank as a result of trade imbalances. The collapse was initially triggered by subprime-credit problems, and he initially underestimated how devastating they would be. More than a few economists are convinced that Roubini’s call was less a matter of his genius and more about the simple fact that if you forecast a recession often enough, sooner or later you’ll be vindicated. “Nouriel Roubini has been singing the doom-and-gloom story for 10 years,” says Nariman Behravesh, chief economist for IHS Global Insight. “Eventually something was going to be right.”

Bad times have certainly been good for Roubini’s social life. For years, he has been a manic host of everything from small dinner parties to big bashes. The soirees are more crowded of late, attracting everyone from members of the hedge-fund set to a former Miss Ukraine and propelling the bachelor economist onto the tabloid gossip pages. (He has become a New York Post regular, and CNBC often plays disco music when he appears on the air.)

Roubini’s partying side may have remained below the media radar but for his energetic use of Facebook. He kept his profile on the social-networking site open to the general public until a few months ago, something more privacy-minded users typically choose not to do. On his profile, he said he was single and interested in meeting women, and he posted photos of himself hamming it up with females who look two or three decades younger than he is.

Among Roubini’s Facebook friends is Sarah Austin, a pretty blond who is featured in a black minidress on the website she runs, Pop17.com, which posts interviews with internet “personalities.” Austin says she received an unsolicited email from Roubini last fall—complete with links to articles about himself—praising her site and inviting her to a party. She has yet to take him up on the invitation, but the two are now regular correspondents. She assumes he approached her because he wanted to be written up on her website—­and also because, she says, “I fit the criteria for his loft parties. There are a lot of women.”

Roubini’s Facebook presence brought the media-gossip blog Gawker into the Roubini story last fall. In a post called “The Secret Pleasures of Dr. Doom,” Nick Denton, the site’s founder, flagged what he saw as a disconnect between Roubini’s “gloomy public image” and “his playboy lifestyle”: “The 50-year-old Iranian-Jewish economist is a ­promiscuous Facebook friend who draws a cosmopolitan crowd to the frequent parties at his Tribeca loft—an apartment with walls indented with plaster vulvas, incidentally.”

MUCH MORE...at
http://www.portfolio.com/business-news/portfolio/2009/03/18/Profile-of-NYU-Economist-Roubini