So what's different? As the financial crash fades in the memory, the question most frequently asked, and infrequently answered, is how permanent will be its imprint. To my mind, the answer is obvious. Everything has changed; and, of course, nothing has changed.
Start with the first of these two propositions. I was struck by an observation made by Gao Xiqing, the president of the China Investment Corporation. Surveying the nationalisation of large chunks of the US financial sector, Washington's takeover of the automobile industry, and the soaring federal budget deficit, Mr Gao said he detected “socialism with American characteristics”. Plenty of Barack Obama's Republican opponents would concur.
The US has not been alone in its interventionism. The British government, once as ardent a disciple as any of let-it-rip financial capitalism, now controls two of the country's four largest banks. Tearing up decades of monetarist orthodoxy, it has been printing money to keep the financial system afloat. A hands-off approach to business has been abandoned in favour of what Lord Mandelson, the ever-energetic business secretary, calls a new “industrial activism”.
The market economy, it is true, has defied excitable predictions that the future would belong to the authoritarian capitalism of China and Russia. The Chinese have certainly navigated a skilful route through the crisis, but that country's marriage of communism to the profit motive is sui generis. As for Russia, without the revenue from its energy resources, Vladimir Putin's brand of crony capitalism would have collapsed long ago.
That said, the Washington Consensus, the organising idea behind the global advance of laisser faire economics, has been unceremoniously buried. The crash was the emerging world's revenge. Forced to take the International Monetary Fund's bitter medicine in the late 1990s, Asian governments vowed never again. As irony would have it, the foreign currency reserves they then accumulated inflated the financial bubble that was to burst with such devastating effect last year. The world's rising economies are not about to take any more lectures from the west on the virtues of liberal markets.
The crisis has restored the legitimacy of the state: bankers have been dethroned, Alan Greenspan defrocked and economists exposed. Regulation is no longer a term of abuse. Adam Smith has made way for John Maynard Keynes as fiscal policy has been rehabilitated as a tool of economic management. The banks have been told to rebuild their capital. Sub-prime mortgages and collateralised debt obligations belong to the past.
Wait a minute, though. Most of this is as much about tone and degree as about substance. Where is the decisive rupture with the past? The second of my two propositions has it right: nothing has changed. And why should it have? Remember those hysterical forecasts about a world hurtling towards economic Armageddon. Well, they turned out to be just that – hysterical.
The global economy has taken a serious knock, at huge human cost. But even the ever-cautious IMF thinks it is now on the mend. Capitalism, to adapt one of Winston Churchill's famous aphorisms, has proved again to be the worst possible system of economic management, except for all the alternatives.
Politics carries the same message. A backlash against free markets would have seen the resurgence of the left. Well, I suppose you could say the crisis gave Mr Obama a helping hand into the White House. But look elsewhere and we are scarcely witnessing a resumption of socialism's long march.
