As far as the stock market goes, the US has pretty much lost a decade already: both the Dow Jones and S&P500 indexes have bobbed up and down 50% since 1998. (The same goes for the NASDAQ, by the way). This indicates the the markets have priced in the shenanigans already: there has been economic activity, but broadly speaking it hasn't been based on wealth creation. You have produced as many useless things (houses that no one will live in, for instance) as useful things.
When you've been living a lie all this time, some pain is bound to follow. For philosophical purposes the difference between recession and debt-fueled boom is small: the only real difference is that people get paid..money which must be paid back later. It is, weirdly enough, an economic zero-sum game. But now it's over, and there's just one way to go on. Maybe there will be a hangover, but these things are temporary.
I think it is wrong to draw parallels to Japan. Extrapolating trends and learning from history almost never works with economics. There are too many random (i.e. unknown) variables. For all we know, the US could get its act together in half a year. You've still got the most powerful economy in the world, it has just been focusing on the wrong things for a while. I'm with Buffett.
Japan has its own issues that have kept it in a virtually stagnant economy for the last 10-15 years. The entire country's natural tendency is to fold back into itself and create pockets of isolation from the outside world - a tendency that has repeated itself for most of their history. It's difficult to draw large scale economic parallels like this without discussing the underlying DNA of the culture supporting the economy in question.
The US also has some serious issues, culturally and economically (duh) but I honestly think we're in better shape. There is of course a very real possibility that we're heading into a time of depression that could last years, but the spark of innovation seems alive and well to me. It may be a little misplaced at the moment but the market has its own ways of correcting that.
When you've been living a lie all this time, some pain is bound to follow. For philosophical purposes the difference between recession and debt-fueled boom is small: the only real difference is that people get paid..money which must be paid back later. It is, weirdly enough, an economic zero-sum game. But now it's over, and there's just one way to go on. Maybe there will be a hangover, but these things are temporary.
I think it is wrong to draw parallels to Japan. Extrapolating trends and learning from history almost never works with economics. There are too many random (i.e. unknown) variables. For all we know, the US could get its act together in half a year. You've still got the most powerful economy in the world, it has just been focusing on the wrong things for a while. I'm with Buffett.