Dear Members and Friends,

Turkish-American Business Forum hosted a Breakfast Seminar with the prominent economist Dr. Nouriel Roubini on April 30th, 2009 at Herrick, Feinstein LLP. Over 80 high-profile businesspeople from a wide range of backgrounds attended the seminar and had the opportunity to network and ask questions to Dr. Roubini directly.

Following the registration and an hour of networking during the breakfast, the seminar started at 9:00 am. Prior to Dr. Roubini’s speech, Business Forum Board member Mehmet Kirdar provided an introduction and background on Dr. Roubini, before handing the floor to Business Forum’s President Ms. Seyhan Erden Arkonac. Ms. Arkonac presented Dr. Roubini the “Global Citizen Award,” a Business Forum annual award to recognize the most impressive and influential businessperson, executive or academician of the year. Dr. Roubini is the first to receive this honor “for his outstanding global perspective and contributions to research and education.”

Known to some on Wall Street as “Dr. Doom”, Dr. Roubini painted yet another gloomy picture for the world economies in the near future. He emphasized that the reality is worse than the worst case scenarios, even though the risk of near-depression has been reduced. The aggressive financial policies around the world, in his opinion, still would not be enough to turn the economies around before 2010. However, on a somewhat more positive note, Dr. Roubini also predicted that there will be some growth in the third and fourth quarters of 2009 though unfortunately, such small growth would not be enough to bring the overall growth to positive digits.

In terms of housing prices, Dr. Roubini is expecting the decrease to continue for another year and half. In his opinion, the United States will be out of recession by the end of 2010, even though the unemployment will continue to be around 10-11%. Dr. Roubini also expressed his skepticism on the recovery of the emerging markets and predicted the collapse of many hedge funds in connection to the failing of these emerging markets.

Dr. Roubini further emphasized that the greatest risks to the global economy will come from deflationary pressures and will last couple of years because of the slack in good markets as demand falls relative to supply, the slack in labor markets as unemployment rises beyond expectations and the slack in commodity markets as commodity prices fall down. A question and answer session followed.

We would like to sincerely thank Mr. Mehmet Kirdar, without whom this successful event would not have been possible. We also would like to thank our venue sponsor Herrick, Feinstein LLP and the contributor Standard New York for their active involvement and kind support.

We also would like to thank all the attendees for their involvement, invaluable support to the Turkish-American Business Forum and the positive feedback we have been receiving on our Breakfast Seminar. We look forward to seeing you again at our future events. If you would like to be a part of the planning, or become a contributing sponsor, to our upcoming events, please feel free to contact us at info@forum.org or 212.599.1192.

Please click here to view the photos of the event. You may reach the event news in the press by  clicking here .

Turkish-American Business Forum