PALO ALTO, Calif. (CNN/Money) - I know the market tanked Monday for a variety of reasons: JDS Uniphase's latest lament (tell me again why JDS Uniphase -- market cap: $3 billion -- still matters?), Wal-Mart's (market cap: $233 billion) cautious commentary, and war wariness all over.

But my dollop of pessimism from the weekend, and therefore my favorite explanation now for why the markets are illin', came from a fine piece on the Sunday New York Times op-ed page penned by Stephen S. Roach, chief economist at investment brokerage Morgan Stanley.

Now when I say "fine" I mean good, not uplifting.

Starting with the headline, "The Costs of Bursting Bubbles," things pretty much got drearier as Roach explained the two bubbles that have yet to burst in the United States: consumer spending and housing.

As I do, Roach believes the housing bubble is self-evident. When housing prices rise far more quickly than rents, there's a bubble. And low rates can keep stock-market-impoverished homebuyers aloft for only so long.

The two bubbles are related. Homeowners flush with inflated equity in their homes continue to spend, just as stockholders used to buy Audi TTs with their paper gains on tech stocks.

Roach believes the bubbles will burst in the order presented, causing an even more worrisome problem -- deflation. This evil of declining prices and wages would signal a truly sick economy.

All this left me feeling glum but also a wee bit unfulfilled. Surely, Roach must have some ideas on how to fix this mess, right? And so I e-mailed him asking just that. Apparently he just happened to be thinking about "Policy Choices," the title of his Monday missive that he fired right back to me.

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To give you the bad news quickly, even Roach doesn't have a quick fix. The three imperatives he sees for global policymakers are these. 1) Get the U.S. economy purged of its bubble-era excesses, a task most of us thought was finished; 2) Wean the rest of the global economy from excessive reliance on the United States, so that the rest of the world doesn't get sick every time the U.S. catches cold; and 3) Persuade mucketymucks to avoid deflation.

Roach is strongest in diagnosis, less adept at prescription. His best idea is that U.S. policymakers should let the value of the dollar fall, forcing Americans to import less and save more. He also thinks the Fed needs to cut rates still further, which would help push the dollar lower and also have the effect of dampening U.S. demand. (Lower returns on domestic investments stifle the urge to splurge, apparently.)

You may have realized by now that even Roach's correctives won't bring about a near-term recovery in the stock market. He's more interested in getting the economy healthy again than in curing the market's woes.

Heads the news is bad. Tails the news is worse. Sigh.

Adam Lashinsky is a senior writer for Fortune magazine. Send e-mail to Adam at lashinskysbottomline@yahoo.com.

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