‘Dr. Doom’ predicts NYC destroyed by nukes, storms in next 20 years
Nouriel Roubini is seriously reconsidering whether he wants to continue living in New York. Mostly because, well, he wants to survive.
“There’s a scenario in which, in the next twelve months, Russia uses tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine and then they attack NATO and we start a conventional war with Russia. The first nuclear weapon is gonna go to New York,” said the 64-year-old NYU economics professor and CEO of Roubini Macro Associates. “Being in New York City is not safe.”
Even if Manhattan manages to avoid nuclear annihilation, there’s still the possibility of a natural disaster, like Hurricane Sandy that flooded New York in 2012, but “much, much worse,” Roubini told The Post. ”In the next 20 years, most of downtown New York is gonna be underwater.”
A recent $52 billion proposal from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which promises to build sea barriers to protect the city from another storm surge, are impractical, he added, because “Who’s gonna pay for that? They don’t even know if it’s gonna work. It’ll take twenty-five years to build and even if we save Manhattan, all of the Jersey Shore and Long Island will get flooded because that water needs to go somewhere.”
You don’t have to talk with Roubini for very long to realize why he earned the nickname “Dr. Doom” — a moniker that, along with his Page Six reputation for partying with models at hot-tub soirées, has always given him a sort of supervillain sheen.
He first came to prominence 16 years ago, correctly predicting the collapse of the housing market and the emergence of a worldwide recession. And now he’s back with a new book, “MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, And How to Survive Them” (Little, Brown), which doubles down on his grim forecasts.
This time, Roubini sees global devastation everywhere, from another financial crisis (a stagflation — like a recession but worse — is coming before the end of 2022, and will be “long and ugly,” he said) to climate change (which Roubini calls a “slow motion train wreck”) to another pandemic that’ll make COVID’s body count look quaint.
Even with his reputation — he’s done nothing to discourage the Dr. Doom moniker — it’s still jarring to hear Roubini talk, especially when he starts connecting the dots. As he contemplates whether to stay in New York, where he resides in a 3,700-square-foot triplex in the East Village, he considers that “a good third of the US won’t be habitable in the next 20 years because of climate change.”
The nation’s coasts, he said, will soon be flooded. “Florida’s gonna be underwater — all of it, not just Miami. Most of the South will be too hot to live. You’ll have drought from Colorado to California and wildfires like crazy all over the West. We’ll have a great migration to the Midwest, into Canada. We’ll have to take over Canada. Literally.”
As in invade Canada? By military force?
“I’m not joking,” Roubini insisted. “The Canadians are gonna say no but they don’t have the army. They have the land and the water, but no army to defend it. Unless they unify with us, everybody’s gonna try and take over Canada. They need a well-armed US to protect them, so we’ll become the United States of North America just out of necessity. I mean, there was a reason Trump wanted to buy Greenland.”
“MegaThreats” follows this same thread of interconnectivity, finding ways that seemingly unrelated future catastrophes — War! Global warming! Job-stealing robots! — play off of and even feed into each other. The biggest unifying principle: There’s not much we can do to stop it. A mere seven pages of the book explores how the future might not result in our extinction.
“This won’t end well,” Roubini concludes in the first chapter. “We are in way too deep.”
His outlook has become even more dismal since finishing the book. Last Monday, during an interview for Yahoo Finance’s 2022 All Markets Summit, Roubini claimed that the broader implications of the war in Ukraine means that “World War III has already started.”
Still, he surprised even himself. “I was a bit crazy speaking about World War III, right?” he said with a laugh. “I don’t say anything about World War III in the book.”
But his thoughts have evolved since watching the escalating tensions across the globe, whether it’s the conflict in Ukraine, “the US and China being on a collision course [or] all the little dictators saying, ‘Me too, me too. We’ve got the bomb too! We need some attention,’” he said. “It’s a bit pathetic.”
The best case scenario, as Roubini sees it, is a return to the economic doldrums and Cold War anxiety of the 1970s.
“That’s if we’re lucky,” he said. “I remember the ’70s and they were a nightmare. But more realistically, we’re heading into a period that’s more like what happened between 1918 and 1945, where we got two world wars, nationalistic military regimes, the Spanish flu, total financial collapse and the Holocaust. I would take the ’70s over that any day.”
When Dr. Doom first began getting headlines for his bleak predictions, he was met with derision and skepticism. When he told an audience of economists at the International Monetary Fund in 2006 that a housing crash and deep recession were inevitable, they laughed. Gawker named Roubini “the Joe Francis of Pessimism Porn” and economist Anirvan Banerjee quipped to the New York Times in 2008: “Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.”
But in the years since, Roubini’s been invited to speak before Congress, the Council on Foreign Relations and the World Economic Forum at Davos. His portending is now called “lucid and nuanced” (by Black Swan investor Nassim Nicholas Taleb) and “sobering and necessary” (by Barry Eichengreen, professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley).
Roubini doesn’t take the praise too much to heart. “I’ve never been always right,” he said. “Nobody’s always right. I’m not a great seer of knowledge or anything.” He pauses to consider this. “But most of the time I’m right.”
Born in Istanbul to Iranian-Jewish parents, Roubini had anything but a stable home life. His family moved frequently during his youth, first to Tehran, Iran, when he was 2, then to Tel Aviv, Israel when he was 3, and finally settling in Milan, Italy, when he was 6. Far from finding it traumatizing, Roubini enjoyed the transient existence so much that today he calls himself a “global nomad,” spending more time on planes than in one city. (He is unmarried and childless.)
He was, however, the black sheep of his family, which includes two younger brothers and a sister, having declined to follow his father’s footsteps into the wholesale rug import-export business. Instead, he went on to study economics in Milan and later Harvard. He also had no interest in Orthodox Judaism, although he did learn to speak Hebrew to converse with relatives in Israel (this is in addition o Italian, English and Farsi, the Western Iranian language spoken by his parents at home.)
Roubini looks back at his childhood as a carefree time, at least compared to today.
“When I was growing up, climate change did not exist as a concern yet,” he said. “Nobody talked about natural resources or superstorms, and the last major global pandemic was in 1918, so that wasn’t a concern. I knew that if I worked and studied hard, I could be anything: a lawyer, an engineer, a banker, a factory worker. And I didn’t have to worry about being displaced by artificial intelligence. We lived in a stable democracy, without extremist political parties. There was some division between right and left, but nothing like the politicization we have today. Nobody was talking about a potential civil war in the US or a violent secession.”
Even when the world began to shift, and Roubini was among the first to set off the alarm bells that humankind was spiraling towards certain doom, he didn’t retreat to some underground bunker, bracing himself for the end. Instead, Dr. Doom earned a new nickname — the Economist Playboy.
After he became a minor celebrity in his early 50s, Roubini ended up in the gossip pages as often as the financial report. He vacationed with George Soros and hosted wild parties at his $5.5 million New York loft, decorated with vulva wall art designed by artist Analia Segal. As he bragged to New York Magazine in 2009, most nights he was surrounded by women who “love my beautiful mind … I’m a rock star among geeks, wonks and nerds.”
The closest Roubini came to actual catastrophe was when the city forced him to remove his private hot tub, big enough to hold 10 models, in 2013.
The country was struggling with a recession, but as Roubini gloated, “The recession has been great for me.”
Even last year, Roubini still seemed to be having fun, telling the New York Times that he’s been feeling “reasonably optimistic,” and showing off his trimmed-down physique from a new regime of diet and exercise.
“I lost 35 pounds,” he announced proudly. Not exactly behavior you’d expect from somebody who was, at the time, writing a book with sentences like, “Calamity seems near certain. Expect many dark days, my friends.”
Roubini prefers the nickname Dr. Realist over Dr. Doom. He’s not a fatalist, he said, just somebody looking to the future with eyes wide open, and considering how it will affect him.
“It’s not just working-class blue collar jobs that are in danger of being replaced by robotic automation,” he said. “My job as an economist trying to predict the Fed, in 10 years, AI is gonna do it better than me. They’re gonna take all the data, every speech of every Fed official, and they’re gonna give you a prediction of the next Fed decision. And the nuance will be far better than what I’m able to provide. Like everybody, I’m heading towards irrelevance.”
But can anything be done? “I’m not sure people are gonna do anything,” he said. “We don’t want to sacrifice today for the sake of our children and future generations. So we discount the future hoping that technology will resolve this problem by some miracle.”
So why, then, doesn’t he just retreat to Canada now?
“There’s plenty of farmland across the border in Canada,” he conceded. “But it’s not just about growing your own food and having your own cows pasturing and your own water resources. You also need security, because everybody’s gonna want to go there. And I’ve never used a gun in my life.”
For all of Roubini’s talk about a “nightmare for humanity” and not having much faith that “people will ever listen,” there’s at least some part of him that believes in a happy ending.
“I think young people are hearing the message,” he said. “I’ll be dead in 30 years, but they’re the ones who really have the most to lose. Hopefully there’ll be a movement, an uprising against what’s coming. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Republican or Democrats — these threats are much more severe than our petty partisan debates. This is about whether the human species is going to survive and thrive or we’re gonna sink.”
And if we sink, he said, “we sink together, and we drown together. We’re all in the same boat. We can watch the boat fill with water, or we can work together to do something about it.”
