It is “financial jihad,” explained Yusuf Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s sharia compass — and the man Feisal Rauf, the brains behind the proposed Ground Zero mosque, admires as “the most well-known legal authority in the whole Muslim world today.” It was 2002 and Qaradawi, who endorses suicide bombing and the targeting of American personnel operating in Islamic countries, was giving a lecture on the need to use the international financial system to support Islamist goals — like Hamas’s war to destroy Israel.

The financial jihad has now achieved its greatest coup so far: It has co-opted the U.S. government as a partner. In fact, if you would like to see a contributor to the jihad, have a look in the mirror. Thanks to the Obama administration, every one of us is complicit. The bailout bonanza made each of us an owner of American Insurance Group (AIG). Under the stewardship of its real CEO, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, AIG proudly runs the world’s most lavishly funded sharia-compliant insurance business — and it is desperately trying to convince a federal court in Michigan that no one should have a problem with that.

Holed up in the Caribbean island of St Bart's, Roubini was forced to choose between two parties. The first hosted by Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich, the second by Colonel Gaddafi's son Hannibal.

While dancing the night away with a Russian oligarch or the son of a Libyan dictator might not be everyone's glass of Cristal, the invitations show just how far the New York university professor has come in the celebrity stakes.

Just three years earlier, Roubini had been the object of derision in the economics community as he prophesied a US housing market crash, financial crisis and partial collapse of the banking sector. Today, as an adviser to governments and central bankers and much feted in the media, he's well aware of the power of being right.

"In my line of business your reputation is based on being right," he says. "The publicity is just noise. Certainly with a global crisis, the dismal scientists are having some prominence, even if most of the economics profession actually failed to predict it."

The 51-year-old, widely known as Dr Doom, is in town to publicise his new book Crisis Economics, a crash course in the financial crisis and what can be done to avoid another.