'Dr. Doom' Nouriel Roubini Upbeat About US Economy

Economist Nouriel Roubini dismissed last week’s sharp market downturn as a sign of an impending recession.

“The markets are often wrong about what’s going on with the economy and what the Fed is going to be doing,” Roubini said in a Bloomberg TV interview Wednesday.

“There is some significant evidence of some slowdown of the economy, but I don’t think the data suggest that we’re going to have a hard landing anytime soon,” Roubini said. “If anything, actually, there’s some elements of strength in the economy.”

This is quite an about-face for Roubini, nicknamed “Dr. Doom” for accurately predicting the housing bubble and the Great Recession in 2008.

In late 2022, pointing to the dangers of the U.S. debt overhang, Roubini warned of a “severe recession.” Wall Street consensus agreed with Roubini, as worries grew about the most aggressive interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve in four decades, Fortune reported.

Other economists now agree with Roubini’s belief the U.S. economy may avoid a recession with mass layoffs.

Apollo Chief Economist Torsten Slok said he believes the U.S. economy will continue to grow at a relatively strong pace. In a note Saturday, he highlighted the Atlanta Fed’s gross domestic product tracker predicting GDP growth of 2.9% in the third quarter.

“The bottom line,” Slok wrote, “is that there are still no signs of a U.S. recession, and the U.S. economy is doing just fine with steady growth in daily and weekly data for restaurant bookings, air travel, hotel bookings, credit card data, bank lending, Broadway show attendance, box office grosses, and weekly data for bankruptcy filings trending lower.”