Sober Up with Nouriel Roubini

Lately I've featured the rather optimistic Brian Wesbury of First Trust Advisors with primetime spots on the MII Blog. Wesbury is very good and is (has been) very bullish on stocks and the economy in the the face of the current slowdown. But there's always room for the other side of the coin, and no one is better to play the bear to Wesbury's bull than Nouriel Roubini (registration required), economics professor at NYU Stern. Roubini weighed in on the current economic environment and the (bleak) outlook for 2008 at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Excerpts from his talk:

The debate today is not any longer on whether we will experience a soft landing or a hard landing in the US; it is rather on how hard the hard landing will be. In other terms on whether the current recession will be relatively mild - say lasting two quarters until the middle of 2008 - or rather be much longer, deeper and uglier and lasting at least four quarters. My view is that the recession will be protracted and painful as a shopped-out, saving-less and debt-burdened consumer is on the ropes and now faltering; while the financial system is on the verge of a systemic crisis that will cause a severe credit crunch...

Indeed the delinquencies and losses in the financial system are spreading from subprime to near prime and prime mortgages; to credit cards and auto loans; to commercial real estate loans; to leveraged loans that financed reckless LBOs; to the losses of the monolines that are effectively bankrupt and at risk of spreading furher massive losses to money market funds and other financial institutions once they get properly downgraded; and soon enough to corporate defaults and junk bonds that will in turn trigger massive losses on credit default swaps; eventual losses in the financial system may add up to more than $1 trillion...

As for decoupling there is no way that the rest of the world can decouple from a US recession. When the US sneezes the rest of the world catches the cold; and unfortunately this time the US will not experience just a case of a mild common cold; it will rather suffer of a painful and protracted episode of pneumonia; thus the real and financial contagion to the rest of the world will be serious...

The Fed will ease aggressively but whatever it does now is too little to late; this easing will not prevent a recession as monetary policy can deal with illiquidity problems but it cannot resolve the deep credit and insolvency issues that plague the US economy; also when there is a glut of capital goods - in 2001 tech capital goods, today a glut of housing, consumer durables and autos the demand for these goods becomes relatively interest rate inelastic; it takes years to clean up this glut and monetary easing does not work as it is like pushing on a string...

U.S. and global equity markets will enter a serious bearish market as a US recession and sharpl global economic slowdown take a toll on investors' risk aversion and firms' earnings and profitability...all risky assets will be under serious pressure in 2008.