Tra la, our superstar economist friend Nouriel Roubini is back in the news! Roubini, a.k.a Dr. Doom, is still upset with us for the whole "Vagina Loft Party Facebook" thing. But we like him regardless!

Nouriel Roubini has made it clear he'd rather be known for his prescient economic predictions than his playboy lifestyle. But his parties are catnip for the media who inflated his reputation.

When does a recession turn into a depression? When economists start getting fired! Since the experts can't even agree on how long this downturn will last, let's hope that starts happening soon.

It should be by now well-established that Nouriel Roubini's media persona—an economist so dour he's known as Dr. Doom—is entirely at odds with his party-loving hottie-stalking ways. (We've published several items about the salons at the playboy-professor's Tribeca loft and the 50-year-old bachelor's rambling and self-aggrandizing notes to women on Facebook.) But that isn't the only tension between the celebrity economist's public and private pronouncements. Roubini—recognized as one of the few economists who predicted the credit crunch—was at the same time just as gloaty as any other self-satisfied real-estate owner about the appreciation of his own apartment. In one of his regular party invitations in 2006 (reproduced below), Dr. Doom boasted to friends and random Facebook hotties that Scarlett Johansson had moved into an apartment directly above him—paying 2½ times what he had just three years earlier. (The apartments have the same double-height 1,300-square-foot floor plan though one assumes the decoration upstairs is more conventional than the moulded vaginas on Roubini's wall.) But the actress' purchase—"very good taste/style on her part"—was less of a boon than it first seemed. The buxom young movie star, most recently in Woody Allen's Victoria Christina Barcelona, was among neighbors who complained about Roubini's party guests wandering the halls of their Leonard Street building, says a former tenant. The building's new policy on parties—the doorman checks off all names against an RSVP list—is apparently designed for Roubini's haphazard salons.

Stewart Alsop, the goofy San Francisco-based venture capitalist, has this in common with Nouriel Roubini, the louche New York University professor known as "Dr. Doom" for his timely predictions of the current market collapse: Both are Facebook stalkers, aggressive in their requesting of friendship from attractive young women. But Alsop has one key difference: He's utterly shameless about it. Roubini was spurred into late-night Hitlerian name-calling by Gawker's reporting on his Facebook habits. We've sometimes felt the urge to hire a bodyguard for CNET video personality Natali Del Conte when she and Alsop attended the same party.But confronted by Mashable about his relationship collection, Alsop freely fessed up: "In his mid-50s, Alsop reaches out to young attractive women and asks if he can be their friend. Many say yes. Alsop says he's an old guy and it makes him feel as if he's got something going on. There's no downside for Alsop. Some may think it's weird, but it doesn't change anything for him." In case you had any doubts on how free-thinking the Bay Area is on such matters, Robin Wolaner, Alsop's "No. 1 girlfriend" and the CEO of social network TeeBeeDee, supports her man's Facebook habit. Even though, in the same Mashable article, she recommends against accepting friend requests from people you don't really know. Like, say, her 50something venture-capitalist boyfriend.

Some background: Nouriel Roubini is an economist known for his longstanding pessimism, at the peak of his professional reputation, vindicated by the financial crisis. The NYU academic, when he's not predicting another great depression, throws parties at his vagina-encrusted Tribeca loft for young Facebook ladies. Nothing wrong with that-but the Iranian-Jewish playboy-professor equates any comment by this site on his decadent personal life with anti-Semitism. In a late-night Facebook rant earlier this week he slammed "trashy junky" Gawker and its Nazi-minded editor. Now the deranged professor disappointed by the supposedly independent journalists who've failed to take up his cause. After the jump: an extraordinary email calling New York magazine's Jessica Pressler a "coward" with a "trashy column." (By the way, Roubini's prescient warnings about the financial plight of the US won him the nickname Dr. Doom. Given his unhinged rants of the last few days, a more appropriate moniker might be Dr. Meltdown.)

We wouldn't want anyone to think that playboy-professor Nouriel Roubini expended all his energy inviting Facebook hotties to join him in St. Tropez, holding soirées at his Tribeca party pad—or giving in to late-night paranoia about the Nazi-financial conspiracy against him. Let us not forget that the Iranian-Jewish roué is also a serious economist, a status confirmed recently by an appearance on the august Charlie Rose Show to discuss the economic crisis. Click for the video. (And that's sure to impress the Facebook ladies.)

Playboy-professor Nouriel Roubini has never ridden so high. The NYU economist was one of the first to warn of impending financial doom; he's burnished his reputation as an eligible intellectual; and I'm sure the regular parties at his vagina-decorated Tribeca apartment are more popular than ever among his Facebook lady-friends. Unfortunately, his economic judgment and taste in women are not matched by public relations skills: provoked by two rather affectionate pieces on his parties and Facebook stalking, Roubini has launched the most extraordinary and embarrassing tirade on my Facebook wall. Apparently the words playboy and roué are the same terms used by Nazis to describe lecherous Jews; case closed. Roubini's personal meltdown-as dramatic as the economic disintegration he's so long predicted-is entirely understandable. It was 2am when he wrote the barrage of Facebook messages reproduced after the jump; the market plunged again yesterday; and Dr. Doom must feel beset by enemies-though not at Gawker, where he promises to provide weeks of good copy and entertainment.

The NYU professor's latest Facebook status message is as doomladen as one would expect: "Nouriel Roubini worries that the world is at risk of a global systemic financial meltdown and a severe global depression." But the economist-nicknamed Dr. Doom for his longstanding prediction that the United States was heading for a bust-doesn't let his somber public persona get in the way of the occasional private frolic. Yesterday we mentioned the cosmopolitan crowd at his vagina-studded loft in Tribeca; that prompted one of the women Roubini has befriended on Facebook to send in a message-as flirtatious as it is self-aggrandizing-that she received when the party-loving economist was summering in St. Tropez. After the jump, the text-and gratuitous photos of some other friends of the 50-year-old Iranian-Jewish roué. (No mean comments, please: these are hard times; let's not begrudge Dr. Doom his pleasures.)

One can tell the world's condition is dire because the practitioners of that famously dismal science, the economists, are the new celebrities. Putting aside Princeton's Paul Krugman-who this week won the Nobel prize for economics-one academic has emerged with a reputation of a seer, Nouriel Roubini. The NYU professor's once-mocked warnings-of a real-estate collapse, equity market slaughter, the systemic bust of the banking system-have largely come to pass.