We are amidst the ruins of a city, after the quake. Measuring the damage is the easy part, and we can make out now the faultlines that caused our horrors. But how much harder it is to assess the risk of future shocks.
The question is: do we rebuild and reinforce the city, or relocate somewhere else entirely?
This is the point we find ourselves at with regards to global finance. The earthquake that struck the financial order in 2007, and which unleashed the tsunami still battering parts of the world today, took a dreadful toll – and not just in terms of jobs and homes and livelihoods.
It robbed us, too, of a sense that the global economy, however imperfect, was basically well-functioning. Now we know it was not.
Professor Roubini's "crash course in the future of finance", in collaboration with freelance writer Stephen Mihm, has been particularly keenly awaited.
His was one of the few voices in the economics profession to have correctly predicted the contours of the crisis. Having identified the US housing market as but one of numerous asset bubbles across the West,
he warned that all finance was in danger, that investment banks would be wiped out, and that the world faced a recession on a par with the Great Depression.