Gloomy economic diktats and predicting the financial crisis have earned economist Nouriel Roubini the title Dr. Doom, but in his latest interview the economics professor said the United States had little to fear, despite ongoing fiscal negotiations and the looming debt ceiling.
"In absolute terms, the United States has significant fiscal, growth and unemployment problems," he said at a Reuters conference in New York on Monday. "[But] paradoxically, if we don't reach an agreement in March on the fiscal debt ceiling and we get another downgrade, yields are going to fall, they're not going to go up. Everywhere else, if a country gets a downgrade, the yields go up, in the U.S. it is the opposite."