Dr. Doom Fears a Double Dip Recession

There’s a debate raging over whether the US will recover quickly or undergo a painful double-dip recession. Guess which side eternal pessimist Nouriel Roubini is on? Dr. Doom doesn’t like the macroeconomic numbers he’s seeing. The horrendous consumer confidence, housing and employment numbers “actually suggest a significant downside risk even to the anemic levels of growth which I forecast for” the first half of 2010, he writes in Forbes.

But the second half could be really grisly, as the economy suffers stimulus withdrawal—and by the way, at the height of the stimulus, “final sales were growing only at a pathetic 1.8% average rate.” Roubini still thinks the risk for a double-dip recession is only 20%, but that’s much higher than conventional wisdom supposes. And there’s still the possibility that Europe’s debt crisis could balloon into a double dip hitting the entire high-income world.