I figured the best way to start off today's postings was to discuss in more detail an article I simply linked to earlier in the year, which discussed the potential for the U.S. to enter its own "lost decade".

(From the NY Times): "In broad strokes, the parallels are alarming. After a long boom, the Japanese economy in the 1990s, as America’s today, was jolted by a sharp plunge in the real estate market.

In Tokyo, the government bankers and policy makers were slow to recognize the scope of the problem. Bad loans piled up. The financial troubles rippled through the economy as consumer spending and job growth fell.

The Japanese slump proved extraordinarily long-lived, ending only a few years ago, a stretch of stagnation known as Japan’s lost decade. It was a humbling and lasting setback for a nation once feared and admired as a model of economic dynamism.

The shadow of Japan hangs over the American economy these days. The United States is sliding into a housing-driven downturn, economists say, just as it also appears to be losing some of its global edge from the productivity-enhancing gains driven by the technology investments of recent decades. For Japan, experts point out, the housing bubble burst just as the rise of China as an export power hurt Japanese manufacturers.

A lengthy slowdown, they say, could alter the economic psychology of America, echoing the Japanese pattern, as the nation enters a period of diminished confidence that restrains consumer spending and business investment.

“I think there are a lot more similarities than people are willing to admit,” said Clyde V. Prestowitz, president of the Economic Strategy Institute, a Washington-based policy research organization that has long promoted American industry.

“The American economy is very fragile now,” said Mr. Prestowitz, who was a trade negotiator with Japan in the Reagan administration.

But the extreme Japanese experience, most analysts agree, stands less as a prediction of America’s fate than as a cautionary example. A Japan-style quagmire, they say, is an outcome that can be avoided in the United States with sound economic policy."

If sound economic policy is the key to avoiding Japan's fate then we might as well call it a wrap and assuming that our lost decade has already begun, Congress doesn't have a clue , the Fed is trying to fix a problem caused by cheap money with more cheap money, and most of the government's so called solutions ignore systemic problems and instead address mere symptoms.