In some important respects, it is the similarities between the two episodes that jump out: spending patterns that exceeded the economy’s ability to generate output that could pay for what was spent; policy errors based on exaggerated reliance on bowdlerised versions of simplistic paradigms (a naïve caricature of Keynesianism in the first instance, a credulous adoption of intensive financialisation in the second); an almost reckless disregard for the fiscal consequences of policy decisions.
And yes, the experience of the past decade has been yet another example of the start-and-stop pattern of the hare-and-tortoise metaphor used more than a decade ago by some other old-hands to describe the previous halfcentury. But the dynamics of the two crises differed a lot.