Roubini Sees Coming Sovereign Debt Defaults, Greece is "Tip of the Iceberg"

April 29 (Bloomberg) -- Nouriel Roubini, the New York University professor who forecast the U.S. recession more than a year before it began, said sovereign debt from the U.S. to Japan and Greece will lead to higher inflation or government defaults.
Almost $1 trillion of worldwide equity value was erased April 27 on concern that debt will spur defaults, derailing the global economy, data compiled by Bloomberg show. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the International Monetary Fund pledged to step up efforts to overcome the Greek fiscal crisis, after bonds and stocks fell across Europe in the past week.
“The bond vigilantes are walking out on Greece, Spain, Portugal, the U.K. and Iceland,” Roubini, 52, said yesterday during a panel discussion on financial markets at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California. “Unfortunately in the U.S., the bond-market vigilantes are not walking out.”
Credit-rating cuts on Greece, Portugal and Spain this week are spurring investors’ concern that the European deficit crisis is spreading and intensifying pressure on policy makers to widen a bailout package. Roubini’s remarks underscore statements by officials such as Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the IMF, that the global economy still faces risks.
“The thing I worry about is the buildup of sovereign debt,” said Roubini, a former adviser to the U.S. Treasury Department and IMF consultant, who in August 2006 predicted a “painful” U.S. recession that came to fruition in December 2007. If the problem isn’t addressed, he said, nations will either fail to meet obligations or experience higher inflation as officials “monetize” their debts, or print money to tackle the shortfalls.
‘Tip of the Iceberg’
“While today markets are worried about Greece, Greece is just the tip of the iceberg, or the canary in the coal mine for a much broader range of fiscal problems,” Roubini, who teaches at NYU’s Stern School of Business, told attendees at the Beverly Hilton hotel. Increasing tax revenue won’t be enough to “save the day,” he said.
Greece “could eventually be forced to get out” of the 16- nation euro region, he said in a Bloomberg Television interview yesterday. That would lead to a decline in the euro and make it “less of a liquid currency,” he said. While a smaller euro zone “makes sense,” he said, “it could be very messy.”
The Stoxx Europe 600 Index fell 1.3 percent to 258.24, a six-week low, yesterday after Standard & Poor’s downgraded Spain’s debt by one step to AA. The euro traded near a one-year low against the dollar.
‘No Willingness’
“Eventually, the fiscal problems of the U.S. will also come to the fore,” he said during the panel discussion. “The risk of something serious happening in the U.S. in the next two or three years is going to be significant” because there’s “no willingness in Washington to do anything” unless forced by the bond markets.
Roubini, chairman and co-founder of Roubini Global Economics LLC in New York, said the U.S. probably will need a combination of increased tax revenue and lower government spending, while Europe needs to curb spending.
Both he and Michael Milken, the founder of the Milken Institute, supported a carbon tax on gasoline, with Roubini saying it would reduce American dependence on oil from overseas, shrink the trade deficit and carbon emissions, and help pay down the U.S. budget deficit.
Milken compared the excess debt of U.S. consumers, companies and government to the nation’s obesity problem, saying the “best solution” is to become more efficient instead of raising taxes or unnecessarily cutting expenditures.
Slimming Down
“If we could just get Americans to reduce their weight to the same as they weighed in 1991, we could save $1 trillion and the U.S. could create $1 trillion of value,” the junk-bond billionaire-turned-philanthropist said on the panel, moderated by Matt Winkler, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News.
Roubini, who predicted a bubble in U.S. housing prices months before the market peaked in 2006, said the U.S. invested too heavily in housing during the past 20 to 30 years, and that spending on education and technology would be more beneficial in the long run.
Milken, 63, is the former high-yield bond chief from Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc. who was indicted on 98 counts of racketeering and securities fraud in 1989, ultimately serving about two years after a plea bargain and sentence reduction. For the past decade, he has focused on philanthropy and running the research institute, which seeks ways to generate capital for people around the world.