The Economic Crisis and the Crisis in Economics
Simon Johnson, MIT and Institute for International Economics 
Does this economic crisis constitute or imply a crisis for economics? There are obviously two answers to this question: no, and yes.
Let me discuss the "no crisis" view first. There are actually several variants on this view. The first is that the post-Keynesian consensus comes through the crisis just fine... A more nuanced version of this view adds some financial accelerators, or perhaps we should now call them decelerators. We obviously had a series of bank runs in mid-September, but not just by small depositors and not just on banks. We also had a situation where falling values for collateral triggered more asset sales (either for accounting reasons or due to market pressure of various kinds), and this led to further lowering of collateral... 

An alternative interpretation is that mainstream macroeconomics is in big trouble. You can think about this in terms of whether standard thinking provides plausible answers to four current policy issues...