A big tip o' the hat to disrael on DailyKos, who caught the latest from economist Thomas Palley, America’s Exhausted Paradigm: Macroeconomic Causes of the Financial Crisis and Great Recession.

Palley's introduction sets the hook quite well:

Most commentary has therefore focused on market failure in the housing and credit markets. But what if the house price bubble developed because the economy needed a bubble to ensure continued growth? In that case the real cause of the crisis would be the economy’s underlying macroeconomic structure. A focus on the housing and credit markets would miss that.