NEW YORK CITY-In the packed Grand Ballroom yesterday at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, economist Nouriel Roubini delivered a lunchtime keynote speech at REIT Week 2011 that centered on the positives and negatives impacting the global economic recovery.

“The global economy is a glass that is half full and half empty,” Roubini, a professor of economics at New York University and the chairman and founder of Roubini Global Economics, told the crowd. The positives, he said, include a global economic recovery that is, in fact, becoming an expansion and a corporate sector that streamlined during the downturn. “There are many positive trends,” he said, “but there are also a number of downsides.”

Those downsides include sovereign risk that remains quite high globally, with large amounts of public debt. Also the Eurozone, though causing less concern this year than last, continues to be troublesome, particularly the smaller countries on the fringe of the union.