We will be very lucky if we reach the bottom in 2009

—Martin Feldstein

Letting Lehman fail was supposed to restore market discipline by showing that not all large firms would be saved. Paradoxically, since Lehman, everybody has been bailed out, everybody has been saved or merged out of existence with taxpayer help.

—Dino Kos, a former senior Fed official and now a managing director at Portales Partners in New York, on the failure of ideology over pragmatism

We won’t get the contraction for a great depression. We know enough to avoid that, but we don’t know nearly enough about getting growth back.

—Simon Johnson, former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund who’s now at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

We’re facing a once-in-a-century problem. The global scale and magnitude of it is much greater than those we’ve seen before. We’re going to face a deep downturn and slow recovery no matter what we do. The challenge now is to contain it to a couple of years and not a decade.

—Kenneth Rogoff 

You still have a massive paranoia in the marketplace and you’ve got that safety-at-any-cost mentality. People are not buying Treasury bills because they think the yields are attractive. They are buying them because they are afraid to put money anywhere else.

—Jay Mueller, who manages about $3 billion of bonds at Wells Fargo Capital Management in Milwaukee

This is not about return and yield and value; investors are functioning out of raw fear. This is fabulous for the Treasury because they are borrowing at virtually nothing.

—Barr Segal, a managing director at Los Angeles-based TCW Group Inc., which oversees $90 billion in fixed-income assets