The thinkers who predicted early on many aspects of this financial crisis

Nouriel Roubini has been included on Time magazine list of the 100 Most Influential Peoople in the World. He recognized was one of the few men that recognized and predicted many of the risks and vlunerabilities that led to this economic and financial crises.


These men were "Dr. Realists, analytically rigorous and intellectually honest and willing to engage in critical thinking rather than follow the herd of the easy consensus. And even among the policy makers there was a difference in views. Alan Greenspan, Don Kohn and Bernanke repeated the mantra that it is impossible to prick asset bubbles and that monetary policy should do nothing when a bubble was rising and then, asymmetrically, aggressively ease when the bubble was bursting to avoid the collateral damage to the real economy. Instead thinkers at the BIS and policy makers such as Tim Geithner, Jean Claude Trichet and Mervyn King had a more nuanced approach on how monetary and credit policy could be used to contain such bubbles. Tim Geithner devoted his first five speeches as President of the New York Fed to the issue of systemic risk in financial markets; he also warned about the unsustainability of the US twin deficits at the time when Bernanke was blaming it all on the global savings glut caused by China and other surplus countries.