January 16, 2009

At Annual Meeting, Economists Try to Make Sense of Financial Meltdown

By DAVID GLENN

The talk of this town in early January was anxious and sometimes remorseful — not surprisingly, since it was heard at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association.

Few scholars said they expected the country's financial downturn to be as severe as the Great Depression, but a substantial number said the United States might be entering a long period of stagnation, as Japan did around 1990. They also questioned the effectiveness of current attempts to deal with the

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