Articles like this are starting to ring little bells for me. There's an argument that the government's reaction to the 1999 financial crisis (and the 1998 Russian bond crisis, which figures in) is what inflated the housing bubble [1], which started to show cracks in 2006 and 2007 (with the Bear Stearns fund collapses) and then went full-bore once things started unwinding in 2008 as home prices started to fall, and the hugely leveraged positions started to unwind.

Since the Fed stopped the liquidation of bad assets and refused to allow pricing to adjust, the question is what new bubble we funneled capital into. There's a lot of evidence that banks have been reluctant to make loans to consumers, both because of real risks around modeling of real estate pricing, and also because of changes in the regulatory regime.

It seems like it's possible that we're starting to see where all the credit has been going -- rampant investment into retail. The article mostly ignores restaurants and grocery stores (explicitly so) but we've seen other articles [2] talking about those sectors starting to show weakness as well.

[1] Not a source that I'd usually cite, but here's Krugman in 2005: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/29/opinion/greenspan-and-the-...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15593880