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.”

The post would most likely have been forgotten if Roubini himself hadn’t responded. He sent a series of rants in the middle of the night to Denton, including this one: “Nick Denton is trying to do a hatchet job on me in two pieces in his trashy junky Gawker; but he is just an ignorant anti-Semite with a Nazi mind and and [sic] a McCarthist [sic] bigot and hypocrite.” Roubini defended the art in question as a “tasteful” piece by a noted Latin American artist. Roubini is, in fact, a serious art collector and a member of the Junior Associates program at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The artist, Analia Segal, is a Guggenheim fellow.

Still, at the party I attended, occasional whispers could be heard among the guests: “Where are the vaginas?” Such chatter notwithstanding, the gathering was a friendly and civilized affair—no inappropriate behavior, not even a preponderance of booze; mostly scattered wine bottles and bubbly water. “I’m a serious professional economist. I live in New York and have a social life,” Roubini says. “I have book parties and social dinners. And, you know, people will take pictures of you with your friends, and there are some attractive women. It doesn’t mean I go out with them. They’re my friends. I have nothing to hide.” When I send him a thank-you email, I can’t resist adding, “If you ask me, the deep mystery at the center of your life is why you would want to subject your apartment to that sort of abuse.” He quickly wrote back, “I do not subject my apt. to abuse. It is nice to have friends over, and I have a housekeeper that cleans up everything afterward.”

Still, Roubini can’t help himself: After Gawker cheekily noted that both he and dating columnist Julia Allison were going to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, he made sure to be photographed with her there. Gawker’s dry comment: “Nouriel Roubini partying with intellectual peers.” Roubini’s response to me: “She’s a very smart cookie. Very smart. She can intelligently discuss lots of things.”

The first time I met Roubini, we had tea at the Algonquin Hotel in midtown Manhattan, a meeting he squeezed in between late-afternoon business engagements and a live CNBC appearance to discuss the economic crisis. He was wearing what I would soon come to recognize as his uniform: an open-­collared blue shirt revealing a bit of chest hair (he buttons up for TV), blue slacks, and a jacket. He looks younger than his 51 years, in part because of his thick, dark hair but also because he is almost boyishly enthusiastic when it comes to the subjects he cares about, which include art and books as well as economics (but not sports). He had just spent the day at his consulting firm, Roubini Global Economics LLC, which began as a webpage for his students in the late 1990s and has since evolved into a 50-person enterprise with offices in London and Hong Kong as well as New York. It was Halloween, and the RGE staff had dressed up as their boss. Roubini was waving around a mask of his likeness they’d given him. “I am going to be Doctor Doom for Halloween,” he declared, mentioning plans to stop off at a few parties after his TV appearance was finished.

Roubini doesn’t come with an off switch. He speaks in paragraphs—plural. I once watched him twirl his eyeglasses for 45 minutes without a break. Emails arrive from him at all hours. When he teaches, he can’t stop himself from telling his second-year MBA students—the folks who will be job hunting soon—how dismal their prospects are.

“There are no jobs in New York. There are no jobs in London,” he proclaimed during a class I sat in on.

The son of an Oriental-rug distributor and the oldest of four children, Roubini was born in Istanbul, but by the time he was five, his family had moved several times, making quick stops in Tehran and Tel Aviv before settling permanently in Italy. Roubini speaks four languages: English, Italian, Hebrew, and Farsi. He says he gravitated to economics out of an interest in left-wing politics. He graduated from college in Italy in 1982 and went on to earn his PhD from Harvard, where he studied under Larry Summers, now President Obama’s chief economic adviser. In 1998, Roubini left academia to work in the Clinton administration, and he has also served as a consultant to both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

During his stint in Washington, Roubini’s dour take on the U.S. economy began to gel. While following the Asian and Latin American monetary crises in the late 1990s, he saw similarities be­tween developing countries and the U.S., arguing that they all fostered crony capitalists and tended to run huge current-account deficits. (In other words, they spent more money than they were taking in. In the case of the U.S., it’s like we were using an in-store credit card at a retailer named China.) He became convinced that the U.S. had the potential to be the biggest bubble of all, and by 2004, he was speaking and writing about his belief that the country was facing economic catastrophe.

Roubini calls his economic approach “holistic.” Instead of primarily studying mathematical models and formulas, he says he also draws his ideas from history, literature, and international politics. He maintains that this eclectic approach is what helped him be so prescient.

Perhaps appropriately for a modern media creature, Roubini has published some of his most notable theories and forecasts not in academic papers but in the form of blog posts. The article that arguably made his career, “The Rising Risk of a Systemic Financial Meltdown: The 12 Steps to Financial Disaster,” was posted on February 5, 2008. It pegged the start of the recession to December 2007 (dead accurate, it turned out) and warned that the downturn would be extremely severe, thanks to the continuing housing bust and the bursting of the credit bubble, which would, in turn, lead to an intense credit contraction and a “serious and protracted” falloff in consumer spending. For good measure, he also predicted the failure of at least one bank with heavy exposure to mortgages and major problems in the shadow banking system, which would affect everything from hedge and money-market funds to investment banks and structured investment vehicles. Losses on credit default swaps, he predicted, could lead to the bankruptcy of a “large broker dealer,” and the entire chain of sorry events would cause an inevitable downward spiral. Bear Stearns collapsed a little more than a month later.  

Roubini was far from the only person to go on television and point out that the world’s financial emperor had no clothes. Morgan Stanley economist Stephen Roach, former Oppenheimer analyst Meredith Whitney, and investment advisers like Gary Shilling, Peter Schiff, and Marc Faber questioned the conventional wisdom during the boom years. What distinguishes Roubini from the others, at least in part, is his persistent attention to the business of publicity.