This book was apparently written without the current financial crisis in mind, but it's hard to see how. Krugman shows how, just like in the 1990s in Asia, the United States' economy (via its new, non-bank banking system), created a situation that more or less mirrored the crises of the early 1930's. Considering how well that went, we have nothing to fear but a decade of economic pain followed by the most devastating war the planet has ever seen... While Krugman doesn't anticipate an actual depression (at least he didn't in 2008), he does (or did) believe that the solutions to the problems of 2008 are very similar to the paths taken during Great Depression. As far as a diagnosis is concerned, Krugman isn't treading any new ground here - there are half a dozen books that do it better - but that's not really his aim. He does set forth a very broad set of ideas for what might actually be done (he's an economist, after all, not strictly a journalist), and that makes it more interesting than it otherwise might have been.