Recession Won’t End Until Year-End, Roubini Says


By Rebecca Keenan

Aug. 3 (Bloomberg) -- The global economy is still in a recession that won’t end until the end of the year, said Nouriel Roubini, the New York University economist who predicted the global financial crisis.

“There is now potentially light at the end of the tunnel,” Roubini said today at the Diggers and Dealers mining conference in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. Roubini was dubbed Dr. Doom for predicting the crisis. “I don’t think this recession will be over until the end of the year.”

Roubini, chairman of Roubini Global Economics and a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, predicted on July 23 that the global economy will begin recovering near the end of 2009 before possibly dropping back into a recession by late 2010 or 2011 because of rising government debt, higher oil prices and a lack of job growth.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said yesterday the most severe recession in the U.S. in at least five decades may be ending and growth may resume at a rate faster than most economists foresee.

The U.S. economy is likely to grow about 1 percent in the next two years, less than the 3 percent “trend,” Roubini said last month. President Barack Obama said on July 30 the U.S. may be seeing the beginning of the end of the recession.

The global economy will contract 1.4 percent this year, deeper than forecast in April, and a sustained recovery from the worst recession since World War II may be a year away, the International Monetary Fund said July 8.

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