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ASH BENNINGTON: Nouriel, I was listening to a talk you gave recently, where you frame this that your best case for what we were seeing moving forward was a greater recession, meaning a recession worse than the Great Recession and the worst case was a greater depression, meaning a depression that could be worse than even the Great Depression.
How did you get to where you are right now, and what are we looking at? NOURIEL ROUBINI: Well, I was looking very carefully at what was going on with the economy and the markets, and already literally at mid-January, I have a proprietary tool that's called the BoomBust dot-com signal. That market was signaling that the S&P 500, when it reached about 3300, it was vastly overbought.
Every major of price action, of valuation, and so on was suggesting that we were in a bubble territory. Then the signal was sent out and was said this is the time in which a bear market might be starting. It took only a few weeks until we got to that bear market and since that signal, the market moved sideways, didn't go much higher.
The market fundamentals were suggesting already that we were in a bubble, in an equity bubble certainly in the United States, and that any shock could lead them to a market downturn. Now, nobody could have predicted that it would have been a pandemic but there are plenty of other things. When you are in a market in which the economy has too much data leverage, asset prices are way overbought, then any macroeconomic shock or other shock can lead to not just a correction, but there's significant bear market so the trigger ended up being the COVID crisis.
Also, early on the market commentators were kept on saying, this is going to be just a market correction, maybe market down 5%, 10% percent, not the bear market, they're saying the economy is not going to go into a recession or if there's going to be a recession, it's going to be just a quarter, and then a very rapid V-shaped recovery.
I was looking at the data and seeing how the pandemic would spread from China to the rest of the world, anybody scientifically could say that's got to go first China, then Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, and then it was spreading to Italy, it would get to the United States so the WHO predicted this will be a global pandemic only later on, but anybody looking at the data could tell it was coming.
Given the sharp economic activity in China, you knew that if in China, you had a shutdown of economic activity, something similar, if not worse, would happen in the rest of the world. The idea there will be correction, or a V shaped recovery did not make any sense. That's why January into early February, and then with a long piece on the Financial Times and [indiscernible], I say that this is delusional to think this is going to be just a correction or a V-shaped recovery.
This is going to be something like a bear market first of all, and there's going to be a severe recession, not just in China, but globally, and it's not going to be a V-shaped recovery. Guess what, at that time, pretty much every market commentator kept on talking of their books and their book was that hold your position.
Don't go shorts, don't sell. It's going to be just a correction. It's going to be a mild economic slowdown. Now, guess what, a month later, literally the consensus now, we're not speaking about me, the consensus says this is going to be a recession greater than the Global Financial Crisis. You look at what Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs are predicting, they are predicting that Q1 economic growth in US is going to be sharply negative between 5% to 10%.
In the second quarter, the economic activity, GDP is going to fall in the second quarter at the annual rate of 25% to 30%. 25% to 30%. We have never seen anything like this, we've not seen it during the Global Financial Crisis, we've not seen it during the Great Depression. Those were slow motion train wrecks, this is just the front loaded, not financial shock, but the real medical, economic shock.
Now, consensus and conventional wisdom speaks about the greater recession. That's baked in already in the market, the fact that the market went down 35% to 40%, as reverse itself, but only 10%. In my view, there were still to come for reasons I'm going to be discussing. Now, the consensus says this is not a correction, it's not a V-shaped recovery, and it's going to be as ugly or probably uglier than the Global financial Crisis.
That's baked in in the prices, the question is whether instead of a great recession, greater than the Global Financial Crisis, we could end up into a greater depression, and in my view that our condition on the wage went up into a greater depression, not a greater recession at this point is guaranteed to happen.
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