Worthwhile Canadian Comparison – NYTimes.com

I’m in Toronto, where I just received an honorary degree from the University of Toronto; and my thoughts have naturally turned, as they don’t do often enough, to matters Canadian. For it seems to me that Canada offers a useful test case for theories about what lies behind the Great Recession and the Not-So-Great Recovery.

In its early stages, the slump was widely seen as essentially a banking crisis. This view in turn led some people — unfortunately, I believe, including some senior people in the Obama administration — to believe that the economy would bounce back quickly once banking was stabilized. In fact, however, banking was stabilized pretty quickly, and most measures of financial disruption look like this:

via Worthwhile Canadian Comparison – NYTimes.com.