Stabilities and instabilities in the macroeconomy

Axel Leijonhufvud's latest piece in Voxeu concludes:
(I have put some sentences in bold font to emphasise the most pertinent points being made)

There are four issues to watch for:

• Twin dangers looming ahead are Japanese-style stagnation on the one hand and Latin-American-style high inflation on the other. In more normal times, we would regard these prospects as both unlikely and very far apart on a spectrum of eventualities. High levels of public debt, large unfunded liabilities, and large current deficits mean that they are not at all far apart in the current situation. The apparent political difficulties in decisively remedying the public finances are likely to mean that this is not just a temporary predicament. The navigable channel between Scylla and Charybdis has become quite narrow.
• One overwhelmingly important fact should guide policy over the near-term future – since current bailouts and stimulus policies have stretched public finances to the utmost, governments do not have the fiscal resources to handle another bubble bursting. Policy, therefore, should be conducted in a fail-safe mode. The current policies of extremely low interest rates are not fail-safe. They are aimed at reflating asset prices just enough to stave off a deeper recession. This is a delicate operation, not a robust, fail-safe move. It is creating strong incentives for the banks to return to the tables and resume the game of maturity transformation at high leverage that got us into our current troubles in the first place. It is evident that the banks are responding promptly to those incentives
• High leverage has been the big culprit in the current disaster. To reduce the risk of another crash, we must curb leverage. But governments do not want the financial sector to deleverage now because the requisite falling asset prices and curtailed credit would deepen the recession. The question, of course, is: If not now, when?
• The central banks are planning “exit strategies” by which they mean returning their balance sheets, which are presently bloated beyond recognition with a mix of strange assets, to a condition more resembling that normal to central banks. This will not be easy. If they succeed, however, they will still face the prospect of having to engage in many of the same desperate, unconventional policies in a future crisis. Under present arrangements, the responsibilities of central banks have no well-defined limits. This problem can only be solved by regulation of the financial sector. At present, it does not seem that we know how to do it.