The most ridiculous thing about the Villagers' take on the Lost Decade is that a generation of regulators in the US (Bernanke, but apparently from what you quote also Geithner) have spent their adult life lecturing everyone about all the mistakes the Japanese made to bring about the "Lost Decade" and then went on to make the same mistakes - same asset bubbles, same refusal to write down debt, same absurdly low interest rates throughout.

The brainless should not be in banking -- Willem Buiter