The U.S. has been living in a situation of excesses for too long. Consumers were out spending more than their income and the country was spending more than its income, running up large current-account deficits. Now we have to tighten our belts and save more.

Nouriel Roubini

I am just a normal human being - I am alive! Why is anyone surprised that I am human? Like many New Yorkers, I have a multifaceted life.

Nouriel Roubini

The economic costs, the financial costs, the job losses, the income losses, the fiscal costs of bailing out financial system are becoming larger and larger.

Nouriel Roubini

I am quite international. My background, born in Turkey. My family is a Jewish family from Iran, so I went from Turkey to Iran to Israel, and then grew up in Italy and ended up in U.S. for graduate school. So I tend to look at things from an international perspective, and I think that gives you a little bit of a broader view of what's going on.

Nouriel Roubini

Among the social media - I've tried them all - Facebook is a bit of a game, but Twitter is a productivity tool. I use it regularly and I'm addicted to it.

Nouriel Roubini

I believe, unlike people that are totally free-market, laissez-faire fundamentalists, that there is an important role that the government can play - one, in providing public goods, whether it's education, health care, or other things, and two, supervising countercyclical policy - stimulus, whether it's monetary, fiscal, or otherwise.

Nouriel Roubini

If you worry about financial Armageddon, it is indeed metaphorically the time to stock your bunker with guns, ammunition, canned food and gold bars.

Nouriel Roubini

I believe investors should invest for the long run, so I don't buy and sell. I usually maintain the classic index of global equities, diversified U.S. and global and emerging markets, and when the risk is larger, I diminish the amount in global equities and put more into liquid assets - but very irregularly.

Nouriel Roubini

Once you run current-account deficits, you depend on the kindness of strangers. This might be the beginning of the end of the American empire.

Nouriel Roubini

Having spent 10 years studying emerging markets, I know that you have patterns repeated over and over again. A bubble is like a fire which needs oxygen to continue... when you see there is no oxygen, things change.

Nouriel Roubini

For me, geopolitical issues are becoming more important, because how can you understand economy if you don't understand geopolitics? People think economists just deal with spreadsheets and charts. That's a narrow-minded caricature.

Nouriel Roubini

I think it's true that the 1 Percent or the elite are living in a world of, maybe, excessive privilege, and they don't fully realize how much pain and suffering, how much anxiety exists out there.

Nouriel Roubini

If we didn't have greed, market economies wouldn't be as innovative as they are. But in my view, greed has to be contained by the fear of losses, so there has to be a system where, if you take too much risk, you go into bankruptcy. You don't systematically bail out people who take excessive risks.

Nouriel Roubini

The trouble is that the average trader on Wall Street, he or she is so young, he doesn't even remember the recession of 2001, let alone the previous one.

Nouriel Roubini

I'm not a pessimist by nature. I'm not someone who sees things in a bleak way.

Nouriel Roubini

My family is a Jewish Iranian family, but I was born in Turkey and raised in Italy. So it's a very mixed background.

Nouriel Roubini

In an extreme credit crunch, leveraged purchases of gold cause forced sales, because any price correction triggers margin calls. As a result, gold can be very volatile - upward and downward - at the peak of a crisis.

Nouriel Roubini

A home is a home, and excess supply leads to prices falling.

Nouriel Roubini

I have more concerns about potential risks and vulnerabilities than most people.

Nouriel Roubini

The U.S. has been living in a situation of excesses for too long. Consumers were out spending more than their income and the country was spending more than its income, running up large current-account deficits. Now we have to tighten our belts and save more.

Nouriel Roubini

The global financial crisis - missed by most analysts - shows that most forecasters are poor at pricing in economic/financial risks, let alone geopolitical ones.

Nouriel Roubini