In the court of 'Dr Doom'- Nouriel Roubini

Nouriel Roubini may dress up as Dr Doom for Halloween." That was the New York University economics professor's Facebook status heading into last night – a fear-stalked night of gloom and ghoulishness that one might assume is his favourite time of year. He has also posted a link to one Facebook user's suggestion that people should blow up and cut out a picture of him to wear as a terrifying mask to their Halloween party.

He is poking fun at himself, of course. After years on the too-bearish-to-bear wing of his profession, Mr Roubini is suddenly the most famous and in-demand economist in the US, precisely because of the unremitting gloom of his predictions for the country. And because he was right.

The housing bubble he predicted in 2006 would go pop? Well, didn't it just. The investment banking business model that he said early this year was leveraged to the point of instability and could not survive? In September, even Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley abandoned it in favour of becoming traditional banks.

And as for the recession that Mr Roubini has long predicted would be the worst since the Great Depression? At every opportunity this year he has said "if it walks and quacks like a recession duck, it is a recession duck". Well, Thursday's US GDP figure, showing the economy starting to contract, was a pretty loud quack.

"This crisis was caused by the largest leveraged asset bubble and credit bubble in history," Mr Roubini told the joint economic committee of Congress this week. "Leveraging and bubbles were not limited to the US housing market but also characterised housing markets in other countries. Moreover, beyond the housing market, excessive borrowing by financial institutions and some segments of the corporate and public sectors occurred in many economies. As a result, a housing bubble, a mortgage bubble, an equity bubble, a bond bubble, a credit bubble, a commodity bubble, a private equity bubble and a hedge funds bubble are all now bursting simultaneously."

Congress summoned the professor to gauge his views on an economic stimulus package it is considering. For the record, he is in favour and thinks it should plough up to $400bn into government spending projects, because businesses and consumers are too tied up in their financial problems to provide the spending that the economy needs.

Congress is not alone. Mr Roubini has been trotting around the globe, speaking to other economists and advising policy wonksters and, of course to the media, to whom he is suddenly a darling. For someone who doesn't own a television, he is on it a lot, each performance out-bearing the previous one. The unique accent – mixed and matched from his four languages – is the same but the hair seems to get wilder each time, the countenance more grave.

New York, where he has lived since becoming professor of economics and international business at the university in Greenwich Village 13 years ago, seems the perfect home for a global wanderer who was born in Turkey to Iranian parents, and who lived in Tehran and Tel Aviv and Italy before his schooldays were done, and who, at 49, remains single. In Manhattan, where his loft apartment in the chi-chi Tribeca neighbourhood is in the same building as the actress Scarlett Johansson, he is something of a man about town, patronising the arts, hosting "high brow and low brow" salons, film screenings and parties, and collecting sculpture.

As his public profile has risen this year, he got himself into an entertaining little spat with Gawker, the celebrity gossip website run by the journalist Nick Denton, which called him a "roué" and recently declared that "the professor's gloomy public image is entirely at odds with his playboy lifestyle and the frequent parties at his Tribeca loft – an apartment with walls indented with plaster vulvas, incidentally."

In a 700-word rant penned in the small hours, Mr Roubini fired back that Mr Denton was "a loser and an intellectual dwarf who cannot engage me on my widely respected views on the economy and financial markets". Oh, and as for those "vagina-studded walls", he wrote: "Too bad that this tasteful art piece that he has never seen has been created by one the best Latin American feminist Jewish artists of her generation, an artist whose work has been showcased in many museums in Latin America and in a show on feminist and post-feminist art in the prestigious White Columns art space in New York."

Mr Roubini's well-regarded economics blog, RGE Monitor, is just as rip-roaring a read, at least as far as is possible for a site about the global financial markets. "The optimists were wrong literally at least six times in a row as the crisis, as I consistently predicted here over the last year, became worse and worse," he said recently, adding: "We are nowhere near the end of the crisis tunnel."

His concerns are now switching to the emerging economies of the Far East and Eastern Europe, where International Monetary Fund bail-outs have been required recently. This speaks to his own background as an economist of emerging market debt crises, studies he forged in the 1990s as country after country defaulted on its sovereign debt and which he used to advise the IMF in a paper aimed at helping it predict the next blow-up.

It is precisely that background, and an insistence on using international comparisons and historical analysis, that led him to predict the current dire state of America's debt-burdened economy and the recession he says will last until nearly the end of next year.

Now, he says, even the better-performing emerging markets, like Brazil, Russia, India and China, are at risk of a hard landing, too. Many emerging markets could face a severe financial crisis. The odds of a global recession are going up, not down, he insists. Oh, and happy Halloween.

Nouriel Roubini: In his own words

*A housing hard landing will lead to a sharp and severe recession. It may also lead to a banking and financial crisis that may be more acute – and cause a more severe credit crunch – than the Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s that led to the 1990-1991 recession.

August 2006

*Aggregate demand is sharply falling below aggregate supply. Unemployment is sharply up. Commodity prices are sharply down and likely to fall much more as the advanced economies recession is becoming global. Deflation and stag-deflation will in six months become the main concern of policy authorities.

October 2008