Nouriel Roubini Still Predicting the End of the World, Partying with Hot Chicks [Dismal Scientists]

Some genius once dubbed New York University economist Nouriel Roubini "the Joe Francis of Pessimism Porn," and yesterday's one-two punch of a Eurotrashy post-Halloween loft party with Oliver Stone and a doomsaying op-ed in the Financial Times proves the point.

We frankly don't understand Roubini's latest apocalyptic pronouncement, published yesterday in the FT, but it has something to do with how "quantitative easing" and "hot money" have created another massive asset bubble that is going to burst and kill us all. Everybody's borrowing in dollars—which we guess the Fed actually will pay you to do, like you get a free dollar for every five you borrow, or something—and investing in the Third World, and it's the "mother of all carry trades" and will ruin the world when the dollar rebounds, which we thought was supposed to be a good thing, but you can't win for losing and Nouriel Roubini will crush your dreams one way or another. It's what doom merchants do. Like the beleaguered Mayan eschatologists busy selling Sony's upcoming 2012, he's simply satisfying a market demand for a framework that renders our generalized anxieties sensible and justified.

And he's got to pay for all those parties at his vulva-studded TriBeCa loft somehow. Last night—on the very day his latest black pronouncement was published—Roubini had Wall Street II director Oliver Stone and some ladies over for post-Halloween merriment. Or, as Roubini put it his Facebook update: "We hanged out."