a global, and not just a U.S. problem. In late spring of 2009, he said, "People talk about the American subprime problem, but there were housing bubbles in the U.K., in Spain, in Ireland, in Iceland, in a large part of emerging Europe, like the Baltics all the way to Hungary and the Balkans. It was not just the U.S., and not just 'subprime.' It was excesses that led to the risk of a tipping point in many different economies." His pessimism is focused on the short-run rather than the medium or long-run. In Foreign Policy (Jan/Feb 2009), he wrote, "Last year's worst-case scenarios came true. The global financial pandemic that I and others had warned about is now upon us. But we are still only in the early stages of this crisis. My predictions for the coming year, unfortunately, are even more dire: The bubbles, and there were many, have only begun to burst". At a conference in January, 2009, he said, the U.S. banking system was "effectively insolvent." He added that the "systemic banking crisis. ... The problems of Citi, Bank of America and others suggest the system is bankrupt. In Europe, it's the same thing." To deal with this problem, he recommended that the U.S. government "do triage between banks that are illiquid and undercapitalized but solvent, and those that are insolvent. The insolvent ones you have to shut down." He adds, "We're in a war economy. You need command-economy allocation of credit to the real economy. Not enough is being done.". In December 2009, as the price of gold exceeded $1,200 an ounce, Roubini said it looked "suspiciously like a bubble." However, by September 2012 gold was trading at $1,700. He still predicted that it was a risky bet, saying that it would take "another Armageddon" to make the price of gold rise again. 2010 In 2010, he again warned that despite an improved economy with rising stock markets, the crisis was not over and new bubbles were on the horizon: “We are just at the next stage. This is where we move from a private to a public debt problem ... We socialised part of the private losses by bailing out financial institutions and providing fiscal stimulus to avoid the great recession from turning into a depression. But rising public debt is never a free lunch, eventually you have to pay for it.” In late