Harvard economics study on this bubble and past bubbles

[c1ue]

http://www.economics.harvard.edu/fac..._Different.pdf

Some excerpts:

Despite widespread concern about the effects on national debt of the early 2000s tax cuts, the run-up in U.S. public debt is actually somewhat below the average of other crisis episodes. In contrast, the pattern of United States current account deficits is markedly worse.

For the five most catastrophic cases (which include episodes in Finland, Japan, Norway, Spain and Sweden), the drop in annual output growth from peak to trough is over 5 percent, and growth remained well below pre-crisis trend even after three years.

As a benchmark for the 2007 U.S. sub-prime crisis, we draw on data from the eighteen bank-centered financial crises from the post-War period, as identified by Kaminsky and Reinhart (1999) and Gerard Caprio et. al. (2005):

These crisis episodes include:

The Five Big Five Crises

: Spain (1977), Norway (1987), Finland (1991),
Sweden (1991) and Japan (1992), where the starting year is in parenthesis.

Other Banking and Financial Crises

: Australia (1989), Canada (1983),
Denmark (1987), France (1994), Germany (1977), Greece (1991), Iceland
(1985), and Italy (1990), and New Zealand (1987), United Kingdom

(1974, 1991, 1995), and United States (1984).

Perhaps the United States will prove a different kind of happy family. Despite many superficial similarities to a typical crisis country, it may yet suffer a growth lapse comparable only to the mildest cases. Perhaps this time will be different as so many argue. Nevertheless, the quantitative and qualitative parallels in run-ups to earlier postwar industrialized-country financial crises are worthy of note.