I saw this on Business Insider:

“Nouriel was predicting collapse from as early as 2002, if not before, and his focus was on the current account and the dollar more than the banks. I first raised the spectre of a massive liquidity crisis for highly leveraged U.S. financial institutions in 2006, so I think my timing and focus were a little better. But I was wrong in one respect: I thought a geopolitical event would be the trigger for a massive repricing of risk. Wrong. It happened all by itself, caused by endogenous forces within the financial system.”

So now Roubini is supposed to have called the collapse in 2002?

Maybe. But when I looked through his archives I could only find speeches to that effect in the summer of 2006. That’s all I’ve heard Roubini claim too.

But now here is Niall Ferguson (above) claiming Roubini called it in 2002.

Time for some more research…

We want to give the man his due. Just because he seems to be draped on the arms of beautiful women at parties nearly everywhere we see his mug, it doesn’t mean he wasn’t right on…er…top..of things..

Update: Megan McArdle says Roubini got the magnitude of the crisis right but not the causes.
(Lila: But he got that right only well into 2007, which I don’t consider prediction so much as description, at that point).

McArdle points out, however, that Roubini was mostly focusing on the current account deficit and the dollar in 2004…neither of which was central to the crisis.

But then she herself goes onto suggest that it was the mispricing of risk through incorrect statistical modeling, as described by Mandelbrot and Taleb (of Black Swan fame)k, that underlay the crisis. But this too is incorrect. Indeed Taleb himself has denied it and said he was misquoted.

Frankly, even though I say it myself, Mobs beats them all in prescience and apt timing in describing why the system toppled over.

In a word – it got hollowed out. I think that was a theme already described in Empire of Debt (Bonner & Wiggin) in 2005 and Financial Reckoning Day (Wiggin & Bonner) in 2002.

All three were read widely by a large swath of the business community and press and plagiarized.