The Crisis We Should Have Had and Still Might

An interesting question is why didn't we have the economic crisis that most economists thought we would have when the housing bubble popped.  One reason is that savings does not equal investment.  The crisis was supposed to be a credit crunch when developing countries decided to stop saving their money and loaning it to us.  However, that never happened and foreigners kept trying to loan money to the US.  Secondly, the real estate and financial bubble was only partly related to the foreign inflows and its popping is completely unrelated.  Moneybox:  

...Some people sat around looking at the US economy from 2002-2006 and thought all was well. But many people looked at it and could see clearly that all was not well. That we were on an unsustainable path and that we were primed for a crash. The main feature of the unsustainable path was huge inflows of foreign capital into AAA-rated American financial instruments, including US gvoernment debt, mortgage-backed securities, etc. These unsustainable flows were distorting employment patterns and sustaining unsustainable living standards. Americans were maintaining broad-based consumption growth only through excessive household indebtedness and underpayment of taxes relative to the quantity of services being received. Someday soon, the capital flows would come to an end and we'd have a version of a classic developing economy sudden stop of "hot money," except it would be happening to a rich industrialized nation. The value of the dollar would crash, restraining inflation would require high interest rates, and the US economy would feature a period of painful restructuring.

There was no particular reason to believe that this crisis would lead to a prolonged period of mass unemployment since the dollar crash would facilitate exports (including tourism) and import-competing industries, but it would very possibly create a stubbord residual of long-term unemployed people. What's more, it would be a prolonged crisis in American living standards.
...But this is not the crisis we're having. Interest rates are low. Headlines tell us that "U.S. Factories Could Suffer From Dollar’s Appeal". I'm inclined to think that we will, at some future point, face the crisis we should have had and it will need to be addressed in complicated ways. But the crisis we're having is, for all its horror and scale, a pretty banal monetary crunch—the natural rate of interest is below zero, nomimal rates can't go below zero, and the Fed won't act to push real rates lower. Fixing that wouldn't fix "all our problems" any more than ending the Great Depression solved all the problems of the America of its time (Jim Crow, anyone?) but it would solve the problem and it doesn't require us to fix the other stuff first.