Economist Nouriel Roubini is well-known for nailing the twists and turns of the global markets and is best remembered for being among the first to predict the\u00a02008 subprime mortgage crisis and the subsequent\u00a0Great Recession. <\/p>\n
He also predicted as early as 2020 that the\u00a0COVID-19 recession would be worse than the 2008 crisis. His correct forecasts about the economic downturns have earned<\/a> him the moniker of “Dr. Doom.” <\/p>\n Related: Wall Street is moving its biggest assets onto the blockchain<\/a> <\/p>\n Roubini has remained a crypto critic <\/p>\n Roubini is one of the most vocal critics of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) and the\u00a0blockchain technology<\/a> underlying these assets. <\/p>\n A blockchain is a decentralized and\u00a0immutable\u00a0digital ledger that securely records transactions across a network of computers.\u00a0A cryptocurrency is a digital currency secured by cryptography that is mined on a blockchain network. <\/p>\n In 2018,\u00a0Roubini\u00a0remarked<\/a>, “99% of crypto land is one sh*tcoin traded for another sh*tcoin.” <\/p>\n While speaking at the\u00a0London Speaker Bureau in 2019, he also criticized the\u00a0blockchain technology, saying<\/a> it\u00a0won’t disrupt finance over the next decade. He said the ongoing FinTech revolution is based on artificial intelligence\/machine learning (AI), Big Data and the Internet of Things (IoT) and has got nothing to do with\u00a0crypto or blockchain. <\/p>\n “Blockchain has been heralded as a potential panacea for everything from poverty and famine to cancer. In fact, it is the most overhyped\u2013and least useful\u2013technology in human history. In practice, blockchain is nothing more than a glorified spreadsheet.” <\/p>\n Though the blockchain\u00a0fundamentalists claim to pretend to be “messiahs for the world’s impoverished, marginalized, and unbanked masses,” they have “created billions of dollars of wealth out of nothing,” he decried. <\/p>\n The economist claimed that blockchain is not about decentralization and democracy but about “greed.” <\/p>\n Trending on TheStreet Roundtable: Roubini tokenizes his investment fund <\/p>\n Atlas Capital Team, an investment firm co-founded by\u00a0Roubini, launched<\/a> its inaugural exchange-traded fund (ETF) called the Atlas America Fund (Nasdaq: USAF) in November 2024. <\/p>\n The USAF ETF offers\u00a0both institutional and retail investors in the United States\u00a0exposure to\u00a0U.S. Treasuries, real estate, gold, and agricultural commodities. <\/p>\n On June 23,\u00a0Roubini surprised<\/a> the crypto industry by\u00a0announcing the launch of\u00a0USAFi,\u00a0a\u00a0permissionless ERC-20\u00a0digital security backed by the\u00a0USAF,\u00a0in the third quarter of 2026. <\/p>\n Tokenization is the process of converting the rights to a real-world asset (RWA) such as real estate, stocks, or art into digital tokens on a blockchain. <\/p>\n In simple words,\u00a0USAFi is a digital token that represents the ownership of the Atlas America Fund (USAF). <\/p>\n The economist, very critical of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology for a long time, has co-authored the\u00a0USAFi\u00a0whitepaper. <\/p>\n Roubini said that he had long argued that\u00a0most digital assets offer no protection from trade wars,\u00a0sanctions, and inflation because these assets are not backed by real assets. <\/p>\n But\u00a0USAFi is different in that it is\u00a0a reserve diversified across Treasuries, gold, food,\u00a0cyber, and\u00a0other industries being reshaped by AI, he argued. <\/p>\n “That is why I have moved from criticism to participation. This is an instrument built for the world as it actually is, not the world as we wish it were,” the economist admitted. <\/p>\n Atlas AI Labs, Atlas Capital Team’s Dubai subsidiary, has secured the in-principle approval from Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) for the token. Once it secures the full issuance license, the token will launch during Q3 2026. <\/p>\n Related: What is tokenization? Explained<\/a> <\/p>\n This story was originally published by TheStreet<\/a> on Jun 23, 2026, where it first appeared in the MARKETS<\/a> section. Add TheStreet as a Preferred Source by clicking here.<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Economist Nouriel Roubini is well-known for nailing the twists and turns of the global markets and is best…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":517410,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[53474,72,113,61,60,89545,202277,220767],"class_list":["post-517409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-blockchain-technology","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-nouriel-roubini","tag-subprime-mortgage-crisis","tag-usaf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=517409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517409\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/517410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=517409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=517409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=517409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}