So many convoluted answers and the likelihood is that those we elect into power will have none of it.

The real answer is simple enough. The tax payer bailed out the banks, and now there is not enough cash in the system to stimulate demand. When we have demand we buy the stuff that is offered, investments that do not benefit the client as much as the provider because those providers are endlessly trying to dig themselves out of the hole they dug with securitisation assets that require an economy 100 times larger to support. It is not demand that is lacking, it is the ability to demand.

Cameron can achieve his blundering objective, make credit card interest illegal or fix it at 3%. Make all private mortgages fixed at 2% and regulate the hell out of bank ponzi schemes. Get back to a fair economic playground where the citizen is more important than the corporation and the dollar. Get back to a political environment where politicians serve the electorate, not the ruling elites. And do not bail out failing gambling banks. Put the bailout cash in the hands of the citizens to buy what they need and restart the engines. Make business that produce exports our priority. Reduce our reliance on gambling to get by.

We get two things remarkably wrong, both are our own purely human inventions: politics and economics. We just need to wake up one fine day and realise that all our assumptions about both are out of date and work out a way to do things that will work. We have the computers and can do the modelling. We need a financial revolution and to realise that capitalism and socialism, neither one, will solve it.

A comment added to this article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/10/stop-another-great-depression-debt?commentpage=last#end-of-comments