It's hard to have much faith when the government's solutions are likely to make things worse, and the key weapons in their arsenal are taking on more debt, printing money and attempting to deflate their way to an economic recovery. Considering that we live in a time when our Congress is berating undercapitalized banks for not increasing their lending volume, it goes without saying that our policy makers may actually be a bigger problem than the systemic issues that created the crisis in the first place.

However despite the above I'm not sure that this is a crisis that you can necessarily fix with economic policy measures, as the systemic problems are so deep seated that it's going to take years to unravel them. At best all policy measures can do (in this particular instance) is mute the impact of issues, or provide a little of a "push" that helps the crisis run its course. The other thing is that even after the crisis is technically over (as far as it continuing to worsen), we could still face a multi-year period of recovery where the damage from the crisis is repaired.

Let's not forget that at the moment we're more reacting to things as they occur and trying to keep things from getting worse, more than we are spending time fixing systemic issues and laying a solid foundation for the future.

Probably a less esoteric way to look at it is to think of the economy as an individual whose personal finances are in shambles due to having lost their job, thus forcing them to have to make decisions (that while technically unwise) are necessary for their day to day survival. This individual doesn't "recover" when they receive their first paycheck from their new job, they recover when they've paid down debts, caught up on past due bills, perhaps purchased home maintenance items they neglected, etc, etc. It may also take some time before the individual feels confident in their finances again.

I.e. In order to avoid a lost decade the U.S. has to only halt the progression of the crisis, but then repair the economic & psychological damage caused by both the crisis and the tactics used to mitigate it.

Sources:

The NY Times: "From Japan's Slump in 1990s, Lessons for U.S."

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Disclosure: at the time of publishing the author didn't own a position in any of the companies mentioned in this article; the ideas expressed are solely the opinions of the author and shouldn't be viewed as financial or investment advice.