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Marcus Gee of the Globe and Mail has a bleak assessment of Japan since her economic collapse in the early 1990's which they haven't recovered from. And how it could now be happening to us.

A second myth is that Japan suffered more than the United States and other countries will today because its bubble was so much bigger. In reality, the credit and asset bubble that built up in the United States was the biggest in history. At the peak of Japan's bubble, it needed three yen of credit to make one yen of national income. The United States needed eight dollars of credit for every dollar of income. In Japan, the bubble grew for only about five years in the high-flying late 1980s. In the United States, the credit binge has been going on for a couple of decades.

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To make matters worse, Americans entered their crisis with a savings rate of zero. In Japan, it was 16 to 17 per cent. Japanese could cope by reducing that over time to about 2 per cent. What will Americans do?

“To put it bluntly, America is much worse off, because there is no buffer,” said Mr. Koll of Tantallon Research. “America runs without a safety net.”

Like the Lloyd Bridges character says in Airplane: "Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit amphetamines."