How we get through this?

This gentleman, looking like a funeral employee, is Nouriel Roubini, known for having predicted the financial crisis we find ourselves on long before anyone. Known is that economists are able to explain the past, but unable to predict the future. Roubini is an exception, therefore he is famous. Capitalizing on its predictive success, he has written the book "How we get through this", which I just read.

The economy is known as "the dismal science" because it deals basically with how to satisfy unlimited wants with limited means. There is never enough, there are always shortages. You must be aware of this when you read books on economics, but when you finish reading the book of Roubini, you have a deep depression: everything goes wrong, there are bubbles to explode in India, public debt is squeezing the Club Med countries, the dollar will soon cease to be the reserve currency and the Euro system will explode ...

Despite its title "How we get through this", if you want answers, if you want to know the way of redemption, you're not going to find it in this book. Only at the end, has a shy tips like these:

• Employees of financial institutions should be paid so that their interests are aligned with those of shareholders.
• Securitization must be transparent, standardized and strictly regulated.
• The "over-the-counter" products must come to light and be traded on organized markets.
• We must review the business model of rating agencies to eliminate the enormous conflict of interest for their income is produced by the companies they themselves qualify.
• Some of the institutions considered too big to fail will have to be split.

Finally, in his pessimistic line, Roubini says, all these reforms are reasonable, but remember that, the best-designed regulations may not work.

That's what I said, the dismal science.