Economic meltdown of '08

It was truly fascinating watching the crisis unfold last October and tracking the debate in near real-time on the econo-blogs. Nothing like a crisis to focus a sense of purpose amongst large groups.

However, now that the immediate terror has subsided a bit, we have a fairly deep division (even amongst economists) about what to do to fix the problem. Everyone is worried that we will repeat Japan's experience, the ominous Lost Decade of growth. The only problem is that there is widespread disagreement on which symptoms matter and which are cause versus effect.

This post does a great jobs of summarizing the current positions and their recommendations:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2009/02/how_did_japan_get_lost.cfm