Turning Japanese?

Paul Krugman, among others, really thinks so. But the Curious Capitalist points us to Foreign Affairs, where Richard Katz argues that we are not repeating Japan's mistakes:

The consequences of the 2008 U.S. financial crisis will be different from Japan's slump in the 1990s for three reasons: the cause of the current crisis is fundamentally different, its scope is far smaller, and the response of policymakers has been quicker and more effective...

The Japanese and U.S. crises differ in many ways, but the starkest contrast is in the response of policymakers. Denial, dithering, and delay were the hallmarks in Tokyo. It took the Bank of Japan nearly nine years to bring the overnight interest rate from its 1991 peak of eight percent down to zero. The U.S. Federal Reserve did that within 16 months of declaring a financial emergency, which it did in August 2007. It has also applied all sorts of unconventional measures to keep credit from drying up.

It took Tokyo eight years to use public money to recapitalize the banks; Washington began to do so in less than a year. Worse yet, Tokyo used government money to help the banks keep lending to insolvent borrowers; U.S. banks have been rapidly writing off their bad debt. Although Tokyo did eventually apply many fiscal stimulus measures, it did so too late and too erratically to have a sufficient impact. The U.S. government, by contrast, has already applied fiscal stimulus, and the Obama administration is proposing a multiyear program totaling as much as five to six percent of U.S. GDP. When it comes to crisis management, it is far better to do too much than too little.