The economy needs new ideas.

The hard part about new economic ideas to fit the current problems isn't thinking them up -- it's getting them accepted. The monetarists, Keynesians and supply-siders would all denounce them as crazy and have all kinds of reasons for why they couldn't work and shouldn't be tried -- and those objections would be loudly seconded by the various special interests that benefit from the way things are even as most everyone else suffers.

As one small relatively simple example of what I mean, (not by itself a magic cure), the joke idea of printing money and throwing it out from helicopters would actually be much more effective than the Fed practice of feeding new money to the zombie banking system. Of course, the ideologically commited economists and politicians, largely in the pay of the entrenched plutocracy, would be horrified at the suggestion that the "joke" might be taken seriously -- and just imagine what the bankers would have to say about it.