The economic crisis of the last two weeks has been so traumatic for so many people that it feels as if we've been in a terrible car wreck and are still staggering around trying to figure out what happened.

A fundamental tenet of our belief system, for both Republicans and Democrats, has been shattered. That was the belief that markets are essentially stable and self-correcting and that we had learned so much from the Great Depression that even in the midst of a stock market crash, our policy-makers could avoid an economic catastrophe. We know that there are economic cycles, but there has been an underlying belief that we know how to manage them. Now that contention is being put to the ultimate test.

What's shocking is that so few of the economic experts saw this coming — or have a sense of where we're going now. In the short run, there's widespread agreement about what must be done: Infuse the banking system with enough capital so that credit starts to flow again.

A panel of economic experts polled Tuesday by The Wall Street Journal said they thought the banking rescue offered by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson this week was generally on the right track and clearly much better than the original bailout the administration had proposed.

As one of the economists said, Paulson has an A- plan, but he gets a grade of C because it was so late in coming.

But Princeton economist and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Blinder, warns that the harder part is yet to come. How will the $700 billion plan be implemented? Which assets should be bought and at what price? How can blatant conflicts of interest be avoided, when the task of actually buying and selling billions of dollars worth of assets will be conducted by private firms chosen by the Treasury? Nothing of this magnitude has ever been done before. The so-called experts are making it up as they proceed.

Blinder has consistently recommended that the government give the highest priority to buying back and restructuring the troubled mortgages that are at the heart of the problem. It's the crumbling housing market that triggered the crisis, and it must eventually be confronted, he says. But what price should the government pay for the mortgages? The larger issue concerns regulation, and how we will treat markets in the aftermath of this debacle. Will the United States continue to be the standard-setter for market economies around the world, or has this crash discredited the American system? Some people fear that all this government intervention — which is really unprecedented — will lead to the rise of a new socialist-style system with heavy government involvement. I don't think that's likely, given the lessons of the last half of the 20th century, when command economies crashed and burned. All you had to do was compare West Germany and East Germany to appreciate the difference.

But just as command economic systems were largely discredited, our free market model's viability has now been called into question. Left to its own devices, we now see the entire system can implode.

That so few people understood how perilous a position we had put ourselves in argues, at the very least, for much more transparency.

But I also want to know where the rating agencies were — Moody's Investor Services, Standard & Poor's and Fitch Ratings — that were supposed to assess risk and give warnings to investors. Shouldn't there have been signs that the economy was over-leveraged? We've been understandably preoccupied with avoiding a catastrophic financial meltdown, but the ramifications of the crash will be felt for months, if not years, to come. The question isn't whether there will be a recession, but how deep and long it will be.

And, then, what type of system will emerge, and even what role the United States will play in the world economy.