The economic debates and analyses on this list )as well as on the Marxism list) are, from the point of view of political action, at best irrelevant. Clearly no one can predict with certainty how the present crisis will develop over the next five years or so. And announcing loudly several times a day that things are bad doesn't do much either.
But suppose, as (some) quite comptent analysts have suggested (and as other shave denied) that it is a crisis of over-accumulation, and on a global scale and at much 'higher' a level than in 1873 or in 1929 - perhaps because ways of staving it off (as Patrick Bond aruges) have become so much more sophisticated. (Note again: I'm not arguing this case, I am merely supposing it from the perspective of a political organizer.)
If that is the case, then after the shock has 'worn off' and people began to recover from it, there will develop a growing popoular response (some of it of a very nasty rightist nature). As Bertell Ollman points out, such explosions are _never_, even by those who bring them off, expected, never predicted. But they do occur.
What the political activist or analyst (or potential political activist) should be asking him/herself now is this: Five years from now, in the midst of a popular explosion, in which I will be involved, perhaps in a leadership position at some level, what then will I wish I had said in 2009?
What to do next is a very bad question. What are the facts is a very bad question. You have to look at the present from the perspective of the future or you will be unable to think poilitically.
Carrol