Back in the days of the "old" Wall Street, the rock stars of the financial world were its biggest dealmakers: the investment bankers, buyout kings, and hedge fund gurus who earned millions or even, in extreme cases, billions of dollars annually by structuring massively complex transactions or pulling off an investment coup.

Flash forward to 2010, and a dramatically different crowd is pulling in standing-room-only crowds at conferences, commanding speaking fees that are at least double what they were two years ago and being lionized by the media. The new stars of Wall Street are the economists: Once shunned and overlooked as tweedy academics or geeky analysts, they're now living the high life.

"I never expected I'd see this happen—good grief, a few years ago, the number of economists on Wall Street were dwindling, and it was hard for a lot of their voices to be heard," says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com, who in the past year has published a book about the credit crisis and testified to the Financial Crisis Investigation Commission. "Now, we've got a big ballooning in the number of kids who want to come here for internships. These are the same people who a few years ago would have been looking to Wall Street as a career and now say they want to become economists!"

Even as investment bankers are increasingly reluctant to discuss what they do for a living in social settings, economists are finding that their "dismal science" is commanding new respect, across the board. Once, IMCA, the Investment Management Consultants' Organization, emphasized new investment products and strategies in designing their annual conferences. Now, the focus is on bringing in as many economists to speak to the thousands of financial planners from across the country who show up every May to listen.

"This is what they feel they need—someone who can help them think about the economic issues that caused the problems that we're dealing with today," says Kevin Sanchez, chair of IMCA's national conference and an institutional consultant with UBS Financial in Walnut Creek, California.

Being able to say they've heard the latest pearls of wisdom drop from the lips of one of the new rock-star economists also stands them in good stead with their clients, who are also becoming increasingly aware of the big "names" in the economy, from Nouriel Roubini and Simon Johnson to Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. "If someone can go back to clients and say, look, this is what I heard Roubini or Stiglitz discuss and here's what it means for your portfolio, that's a big boost for their credibility," Sanchez adds.

At IMCA's January regional conference in New York, it was standing room only in the ballroom of the Grand Hyatt hotel when Roubini, who teaches at New York University as well as overseeing his own economic advisory firm, got up to speak. Best known for having predicted the crisis, he's the epitome of the economist-as-rock-star phenomenon, hanging out in St. Barts with Euro-celebs, hobnobbing with bigwigs at Davos, and being snapped with attractive young women as parties in his SoHo loft. He's even embarked on a public spat with celeb-watching website, Gawker.com—a sure sign that someone has made it in the big time.

That celebrity is translating into big bucks for Roubini as well. While his consulting firm is privately owned and it's hard to tell how much he makes as a result of his newfound celebrity status, Penguin paid him about $800,000 as an advance on his upcoming book, Crisis Economics, due out in May, publishing sources say. (They add Roubini's status as the guy who predicted the crash makes him a "special case.")

Simon Johnson, a more universally respected economist at MIT's Sloan School of Management and an alumnus of the International Monetary Fund, was dubbed "public intellectual of the year" by a British magazine and has his own book, 13 Bankers, due out at the end of March. That book was sold at auction for an advance that was rumored to be in the mid six digits, industry sources say. As interesting as the size of the advance itself is the publisher: It was snapped up by the Pantheon label at Knopf; Knopf is better known as a publisher of literary fiction by authors such as Haruki Murakami and Alice Munro than hardcore economics books by college professors.

At IMCA's upcoming conference in Orlando, Florida, the marquee speaker will be Joseph Stiglitz, who won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics and whose most recent book, Freefall, is a devastating critique of most conventional economic theories and what he refers to as "bubble capitalism." "He's a lot more expensive a speaker today than he would have been a few years ago, but he brings a lot of value to the conference," Sanchez says.