NOURIEL ROUBINI, bell-ringing herald of economic end-times, received the New York Times Sunday magazine treatment this week. The piece, which dubs Mr Roubini, "Dr Doom", tracks his rise to prominence and popularity as his relentlessly pessimistic economic forecasts began to look more and more like reality. A few others have weighed in on the piece. Here's Mr Roubini's former colleague, Brad Setser:

I wouldn’t mind if Dr. Roubini was proved to be a bit too pessimistic, and not all the near-term risks he sees come to pass. But I also think it would be a mistake to base policy on the assumption that the worst of the credit crisis is over.

Paul Krugman adds:

The article is unfair to the economics profession in suggesting that economists other than Hyman Minsky neglect the study of financial crises; some economists have worked quite a lot on the subject. (Before I went to work for the Times, I was sort of a financial ambulance chaser, spending a lot of time in places like Buenos Aires and Jakarta.) Furthermore, quite a few of us saw that there was a huge housing bubble waiting to pop; to this day I don’t understand why this wasn’t obvious to everyone. What Nouriel deserves special credit for was his argument that there would be large “knock-on” effects from the bursting bubble on the financial system — that banks and other financial institutions would lose so much capital that the effect would be to freeze up the financial system. (Yes, I know, we’ve got a financial meltdown causing a freeze, not to mention a crunchy squeeze. Whatever.) In retrospect, this seems obvious — but right up until a year ago, the word was that the crisis was “contained”, and Nouriel was way in front of everyone else in saying that it wasn’t.

One should obviously be hesitant in criticising someone who has gotten quite a bit right about the current crisis. All the same, getting things right is only half-worthy of praise. The other half depends on why one got it right. Did circumstances overlap with a bias adopted to carve out a market niche, was there genuine insight, or was there some combination of the two? I long ago stopped reading Mr Roubini, simply because I found very little valuable information in his work. His writing struck me as indiscriminately negative, spinning any factoid or data point into further evidence that the end was nigh.

In part, his tone was problematic. As Mr Krugman notes, there were plenty of people who foresaw trouble in the American economy, but there was always (and there remains) considerable uncertainty in the path of the crisis and recovery. When someone repeatedly tells me that deep recession is imminent, no ifs, ands, or buts, I'm sceptical. No one should ever be so confident in their forecasts.

But I suppose I'm open to persuasion. Tell me, readers, have I misjudged Mr Roubini?

(Photo credit: AP)