I'm in the "worse than 2008" camp, mostly due to the reasons the OP gives. Another consideration is that our current expansion has been a very long one, and the longer an expansion goes on, the more fraudulent cruft accumulates, the cruft beings things like assets not marked to actual market value, money-losing businesses subsidized in various ways, and sometimes outright Madoff-like fraud. This cruft appears financially viable from the outside but collapses when stressed, and nobody really knows how much of it is out there.