Let me hazard a guess that whoever wrote those headlines at the FT and the Huff are in the primes of their lives. By contrast I am approaching 60. It is out of necessity that I reveal this shocking fact - to put into perspective my views here, which are based on my experience of four serious bouts of national and international economic trauma during my adult life.
I am not counting the economic catastrophes of the 1970s - symbolised by the 3 Day Week and the rationing of electricity… can you Dear Reader, imagine that? - which I confess barely dented the student cocoon which then enveloped me.
However, I can tell you that the recession of the early 1980s, when Mrs Thatcher was famously "not for turning" was a stinker - far worse in terms of jobs lost and economic misery than this one has been so far. I'd say it took at least five years from the teeth of that recession for it to be widely felt that it was over. I should explain "Felt that it was over", which is not a widely recognised economic measure. I refer to the average person's confidence about his economic prospects - centred on expectations for secure employment. "Felt that it was over" is not the IMF's measure: that's growth. Well, growth is key to the cure, but recession malaise lingers long after growth sets in.
In 1990 the UK launched into the same thing all over again. Without consulting any economic statistics, I can tell you that 1990 was not as bad as 1980 but it was still dire. I remember the banks scrunching themselves up to repossess houses from distressed individuals who had been sucked into the late 1980s property bubble by too generous mortgage offers. Perhaps just a little conservatively, in 1997 I wrote a piece in this magazine which opined that that recession was finally behind us.
I recollect in glorious technicolour the stock market crash of 1987, which brought a painful end to my spread-betting career, and the bursting of the tech bubble in March 2000. I think I was a bit less surprised by that one. I must have learned something.
Which I now put before you: this recession has a very long way to go and if the International Monetary Fund is now recognising that it's going to take a bit longer for recovery to set in, it really needs to hire a few 60 year olds. Who could tell it that the causes of this recession and the things that went wrong in order to bring it about are so very profound that if the IMF ever thought they could have been on the mend by now, then it needs a cold bath.
Banks everywhere are discredited. Many are bust and those that aren't are shrinking. The only new money they will lend for years ahead is what is squeezed out of them by gesture politics. Regulators are suspicious of banks. Bankers are suspicious of each other. The public is suspicious of them all. Five years of new reality has not been sufficient to recover from two decades of rapid credit expansion. The new international banking rules don't come into effect for another five years, for the very sensible reason that banks need another five years to shrink into them. This picture essentially applies to all banks everywhere: no foreign banks will move in anywhere to take up domestic bank slack. There is no impending flood of eurodollars; none of petrodollars. There is no money for new business. Recovery cannot set in until there is.
No-one knows how to deal with global slowdown. (This, at least, is evident from the IMF report.) Should we have growth or austerity? Fortunately, beggar-my-neighbour protectionism seems muted, but no western country including Germany shows any sign of knowing where to turn next. We are all in this together and if China lurches downwards, we're all sunk.
Against this background, the world is struggling to become a single economic unit, a process as profound as a single country industrialising to the power of ten. CEOs and the wealthy have developed a dubious independence from state and national controls, whilst governments' loss of the levers of power has been even more profound.
The IMF will report many more setbacks.
