As a futurist, this is my analysis of the past & present.
The US are broke, and many US industries as well, but they don't acknowledge it yet and are not treated as such by the rest of the saving world.
US and US industries have lived for centuries in a perverted businessmodel, called a piramid game, that allowed business to live on borrowed monopoly-money, not backed by real products and innovation.
Any piramid game unfortunetaley makes the risk-takers rich and the risk-avoiders poor & look stupid - provided you get in at the right time and bail out at the right time. The price for all of this is being paid by the hard working citizens like you and me all around the world.
The financial industry is a separate thing. The perverted bonus culture was and is only possible (in an economic sense) because this industy -- as the *only* industry - has a link to paradise, that is: free money -- provided by central banks all over the world. Basically, financial industry has been cheating on a global scale over the last 2 centuries -- and no one noticed.
Government's task is to prevent people and businesses form cheating. Government did and does not perform this task. As long a billions of bonuses are paid out in the financial sector, *there is no credit crisis*. Just do your duty as a government regulator: take back the bonuses and put the money where it belongs: in the real world, and use it for sustainable investements.
As a futurist, this is my expectation for the future:

The key to the future is investing in everything systainable. There will be a giant redesign of everything physical and virtual in the next decades: cars, buildings, houses, clothing, businessmodels. Invest in the number 0. Zero is the number of the future. 0 oil, 0 transport, 0 emission, 0 noise, 0 toxin, basically: 0 misery. That is where the profits are!
The US Big CAR 3 should go banckrupt. They should not be saved, because they are part of a perverted system. Saving them will only make the final big boom bigger. Put your money into the newcomers in every industry that challenge the system. For example, there are lots of newcomers in the car industry that go for electric or fuelcell or hybrid cars. Back the newcomers, don't back the dynosaurs.

I agree with the other participants in the discussion that focus on short term, absence of government regulation, and " dealing with less" are other keys to the solution.

I disagree that we see the end of the consumption economy. We see the end of the *unsustainable* consumption economy. We are heading for a new Golden Century in terms of wealth and happiness.

One last remark. This crisis is special (first global ever), and yet it is a crisis like any other. Thanks to our giant wealth, we are more prone than ever in history to cope with it, and we will get up again in time.

Kindly,
Marcel Bullinga, Dutch futurist
www.futurecheck.eu