One leading economic expert, Nouriel Roubini, has suggested that the best investment recently was gold ... together with guns, ammunition, canned food, and log cabins in the mountains!

Perhaps we might indeed get to that point – but we should still be a long way short of it, and there is no reason why it cannot be postponed indefinitely, so long as we stop talking ourselves into a recession.

Yet Professor Roubini’s half-joke was treated as serious by elements in the media intent on making news seem as sensational as possible. These are the people who tried to turn 2008 into an even worse crisis than it was. Some of the worst culprits are in the state-run British Broadcasting Corporation, whose analysis has been embarrassingly bad.

Here is the truth: growth, at least in most parts of the West, will be slow for some time, especially if nothing is done to help business, but there is no legitimate economic reason why there has to be a “double dip recession”.

The problem is that politicians want an instant fix: they encourage voters to expect things to return to how they were before 2008. That will not – and should not – happen, because the pre-2008 boom was artificial, fuelled by bad credit, but politicians would still rather think in terms of a quick “stimulus” than address the long-term structural weaknesses of most Western economies. If 2008 was primarily the Bankers’ Crisis – or, to be fair, the Bankers’ and Borrowers’ Crisis – 2011 will be the Politicians’ Crisis unless the politicians grow up fast.

There are some positive signs. Britain is borrowing less than expected. Across the Channel, France and Germany may have cynical motives in suggesting tighter governance by Europe, but the one thing on which Euro-federalists and Euro-sceptics agree is that the eurozone cannot operate without more discipline imposed from the centre. Whatever one’s political view of the suggestion, it does at least reflect financial reality, and if other EU members opt out, so that the result is a two-speed or multi-speed Europe, that too would be an accurate reflection of economic facts.

Even America can still pull itself together. In 2008, George W Bush was a lame duck President, deeply unpopular, with both Houses of Congress controlled by his opponents, but he still managed to get all parties around a table and thrash out, in only a few days, a deal that saved the banking sector. President Obama needs to do something similar with the debt problem. He cannot wait for the report of the “super committee” – which will, in any case, probably be dead on arrival. He needs to stop complaining, in a very partisan manner, about how partisan his partisan opponents are, and to take the initiative over the summer by making his own proposals for cuts. If the precedent of George W Bush does not appeal to him, then he should at least heed the wise words of Xena, a leading Warrior Princess, “Act, don’t react.”