I have to admit to being more worried about inflation than deflation. From The Bears's Lair, Martin Hutchinson gives one possible scenario:

"Even if inflation is declining gradually as output declines, it will not have time to become deflation in the 9-12 months before output reaches bottom – if we were about to experience Great Depression II the decline would be more prolonged, but we’re not. Once output has bottomed out, the inflationary picture changes radically. Budget deficits in the United States, the EU, China, India and Japan will be enormous, causing sharp rises in interest rates as government bonds “crowd out” the private sector. Money supply, which will have been increasing because of the very low nominal interest rates, will now be grossly excessive for the shrunken GDP.

Costs, which were held down by the wave of bankruptcies in the contraction, will once again increase as supply comes once again to balance demand. For one thing, higher interest rates and capital costs (through lower equity prices) will themselves produce a sharp upward ratchet effect on corporate break-evens, both in the US and more especially in emerging markets where capital will be scarce. Lower production volumes against which fixed costs can be amortized will also increase unit costs. The overall effect will be sharp upward pressure on prices -- those continuing to sell at a loss to keep the factory at its most efficient output level and workers employed will be rapidly driven out of business.

Inflation will thus resurge, both domestically and internationally, and will quickly reach the double-digit level at which central bank action to restrain it becomes unavoidable (amusingly, unexpectedly awful inflation figures are likely to appear before the January 2010 end of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s term, forcing him to admit while still in office that his “deflation” warnings were hogwash.) Interest rates will gradually be forced upwards to inflation-plus-4% levels in the last months of 2009 and throughout 2010, producing a second “dip” of recession in 2011 and a non-inflationary recovery in 2012-13. The turn from economic decline (but not truly deflation) to inflation will be well indicated by the gold market, which can expect to surge as the economic bottom is approached.

As often happens, the “gold bugs” will turn out to be right in the end, even if their performance during 2008 has been dreadful – for those that survive, 2009 is likely to be a banner year. Deflationists will proclaim each slowing inflation figure in the early months of 2009 to be evidence for their case, though in reality those months will see not true deflation but simply slowing inflation accompanied by sharp descent into recession. However in the long run, monetarists will prove to have been right – and the decade of excessive money supply expansion from 1995-2008 will impose its final penalties on the unfortunate US and global public. Monetarists will also have the satisfaction of knowing that higher real interest rates will have become inescapable, and that overexpansion of money supply will never happen again – until some future generation of idiots has forgotten the economic history of these decades."

My concerns are the debt/deficit and rising interest rates to service it down the road. I don't say that I see a disaster or, indeed, a scenario quite as dire as this, but I think that, once we get through this nightmare, we are going to have to quickly deal with this problem.

Part of the problem is that I, too, see the need for a stimulus and tax cuts to combat this aversion and flight from risk. So, count me in as one causing the problem, but who will battle at least as hard to get us out of it down the line.