As far as I can tell, most analysts now concede that the bursting credit and real estate bubbles played a key role in bringing about the devastating downturn of the past two years.

Logically, that would suggest that a sustainable recovery is going to require some degree of stability -- no, normalcy -- in these two areas. Yet by most accounts, credit markets are on life support, dominated by the Federal Reserve and banks with broken business models that are somehow too big to fail.