Also, a quick look at just about every economic empire in history shows their decline was always associated with a massive negative trade balance. The theorists seem to ignore this though. If it's not codified in a dazzling formula, it's irrelevant.

Not that I'm for protectionism or anti-globalization, but it's certainly not beyond questioning, reconsidering, and/or re-engineering.

They look pretty much the same from the perspective of July 2010. What's the big difference?

If you add up the TARP and all the alphabet soup lending support programs, the stimulus package/s, and Fed's quantitative easing intervention, you're talking well over a trillion dollars, and we're still not out of it yet.

This was a speculative debt bubble followed by the inevitable financial crisis. See Rogoff & Reinhardt. Definitely not part of the business cycle.

Eliyahu M. Goldratt wrote an interesting book on the subject in the 1980s.