WSJ Blog pointed this paper/commentary from Barry Eichengreen. Eichengreen is an economist with multiple hats. He has written insightful papers on financial history, great depression, capital flows, financial stability etc etc.
In this paper, he tracks the crisis from an interesting political economy angle. First he says:
As a financial historian, I have come to expect phone calls from reporters whenever the stock market tanks. .Could this be the start of another Great Depression, they ask?. No, I respond, a stock market crash is not the same as a depression. More to the point, policy makers have learned the lessons of history. Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, is a student of the Great Depression. He understands that policy mistakes were responsible, in good part, for the economic crisis of the 1930s. He is committed to avoid their repetition. What happened before will not be allowed to happen again, I confidently conclude. Now I have stopped taking reporters calls.
Mostly Economics 
