All around the world, economies seem to be turning a corner, moving out of a period of this global recession in which the good news was just that things were getting bad more slowly into one in which things are actually getting better. Exports are picking up, order books are getting fatter, production is starting to rise in America, China, Germany, Japan and even Britain.
No one can know whether just around that corner a mugger might be lurking, ready to give economies a new thump in the solar plexus. Such things could happen because of politics — remember the 1979 Iranian revolution, which delivered a second oil shock — or because some new financial horror is exposed.
But let us, in a positive summer spirit, assume that recovery really is beginning. If that were true, and were to be sustained during the autumn, what would it tell us about the legacy of what would thus be the Great Global Financial-Crisis-cum-Recession of 2007-09? I would point to four big things, the biggest of which is that the age of liberalism, of the pro-market ideas commonly associated with Margaret Thatcher, is not dead after all.
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