It would be the height of foolishness to load up on debt now, right?

Just look at the news these days. Homeowners are being foreclosed on at a record clip. Governments around the world are lurching toward insolvency. Job growth in the U.S. remains feeble at best. And at the center of the global economic storm are bad loans, which promise to weigh on consumers, businesses and governments for years if not decades to come.

And...