Slate's Daniel Gross reports on a talk by deputy governor of the Bank of Japan Kiyohiko Nishimura  titled "The Past Does Not Repeat Itself, but It Rhymes."  As Gross writes, a Japanes central banker...

...is well-situated to comment on the current global crisis, given Japan's own sad history of dealing with the overhang of a credit/real estate bubble—or, more accurately, of not dealing with it. The government and private-sector's uncertain policies condemned Japan to a traumatic lost decade of slow growth.

In his talk, Nishimura points to a remarkable similarity between Japan's economic fall and recovery during the 1990s and the current crisis in the US.  But while the patterns look the same, the pace is completely different.  For the last year, the rate in the US has been about 7 times faster than it was in Japan.  Gross:

According to Nishimura's schema, in less than two and a half years, the United States has experienced as much trauma and recovery as Japan did in about 12 years. All of which means that if the dog-years analogy continues, things could start looking up by early next year. But we shouldn't get too far ahead ourselves. There are other lessons to be learned from Japan's experience of starts and stops. "We should be careful not to be very optimistic," Nishimura concluded. "That's my advice to myself."

Read the A Recession in Dog Years here.