From the Financial Times:

What has been the fiscal performance of President Barack Obama? He inherited the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, as well as a budget deficit that – after much needed bail-outs and a series of reckless tax cuts – was already close to $1,000bn. His stimulus package, together with a backstop of the financial system, low rates and quantitative easing from the Federal Reserve, prevented another depression. Mr Obama also deserves credit that the US, alone among advanced economies, currently supports a “growth now”, rather than an “austerity now” path.

An anemic and subpar U.S. recovery amid balance-sheet repair, weak demand, slack in the economy and disinflationary pressures has always been our baseline scenario. By the summer of 2010, the disinflationary bias in expectations had become more evident, and the economy—lacking a self-sustained recovery—had started heading toward a dangerous stall speed. We vocally expressed our concerns around deflation/stagnation/double-dip scenarios and called for more policy action, while recognizing that the effects on the real economy would be limited.

From NPR: The American economy is aloft, says economist Nouriel Roubini. But barely.

"The economy is growing so slowly that like a plane that is slowing down very fast, it might reach a point of falling off the cliff," he tells NPR's Guy Raz.

Editor’s Note: This is a short excerpt of a much longer piece of research made available to RGE clients last week.

The risk of global currency and trade wars is rising, with most economies now engaged in competitive devaluations. All are playing a game that some must lose.

From Foreign Policy:

How Obama can save the fragile economy from going back into a tailspin.

Roughly three years since the onset of the financial crisis, the U.S. economy increasingly looks vulnerable to falling back into recession. The United States is flirting with "stall speed," an anemic rate of growth that, if it persists, can lead to collapses in spending, consumer confidence, credit, and other crucial engines of growth. Call it a "double dip" or the Great Recession, Round II: Whatever the term, we're talking about a negative feedback loop that would be devilishly hard to break.

About This Event

Yuan Revaluation for China's Own Sake

By Peter Stein

U.S. lawmakers have put China's currency policy high up on America's political agenda. Nouriel Roubini believes it ought to be even higher on China's economic agenda.

The famously gloomy economist, known in part for his prescient views ahead of the global financial crisis, says China needs to revalue its currency, the yuan, not because failure to do so hurts the U.S. Rather, keeping the yuan artificially low will lead China's own economy to hit a dangerous "growth wall" in the next two to three years, he said in an interview on the sidelines of the World Capital Markets Symposium in Kuala Lumpur last week.

CNBC Video -- Expect a Slow and Anemic Recovery: Roubini (Click for Video [4:54])

On the two year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Sebastian Mallaby, the Director of the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies and Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, sat down with Nouriel Roubini at RGE’s New York headquarters on Morton Street for a spirited discussion on the future of finance.