The Man Who Saw It Coming: Meet Dr. Doom

Not a 'Permabear'?

Still, not everyone is convinced of Roubini's prognostication skills. Kenneth Rogoff, an economics professor at Harvard who has known Roubini since he was a grad student, said Roubini has been pessimistic about the economy for a long time.

"He provides a lot of value-added [analysis] because he's looking at dark scenarios and what could happen and how it could happen," he said.

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But, he said, "I don't think the point is that he called the recession, because he's called the recession repeatedly for many years."

Roubini dismisses the idea that he is a "permabear" -- economist slang for someone who systematically projects downturns -- just as he dismissed skepticism about the dire predictions he made two years ago.

"When there is a bubble, there is euphoria and irrational exuberance and people lose track of the overall underlying fundamentals," he said. "I was comfortable with the rigor of my analysis."

After a decade spent studying financial crises in emerging markets, Roubini was able to draw parallels between emerging market countries and the well-established U.S. economy through everything from housing and credit bubbles to enormous deficits.

The United States, Roubini told the New York Times in August, "looked like the biggest emerging market of all."

His work, he said, is holistic in that he relies not just on statistical models but also on empirical experience and history.

Roubini's own history is as complicated as some of his analysis.

The son of an Iranian-Jewish Persian carpet exporter and a homemaker, Roubini lived in three different countries before the age of 5. He was born in Turkey while his parents were there on business, later moved to Tehran and then Tel Aviv, Israel before his family -- Roubini is the oldest of four -- finally settled in Italy.