L-shaped Recession

At a seminar he gave at the University of Cincinnati on Friday, Krugman answered the following question about the economic crisis:

What will it take to pull out of this crisis?

I'm in the camp that really worries about the L-shaped recession. We level off but we don't get the recovery. We hope it isn't, but it has all the markings of it. This looks like the kind of slump that has all the markings of where normal recovery forces are very, very weak.

It's hard to see where recovery comes from. Almost always the way a country recovers from a financial crisis is with an export boom. The problem is that we have a global crisis this time. So who are we going to export to, unless we find another planet to take our stuff?

See the rest of his conversation here.