Only the US – which borrowed massively, restructured its banks and printed money on a historic scale – enjoys anything like a sustainable recovery, and even that's being sustained only by the promise that quantitative easing will go on ad infinitum.
The magic ingredient driving last year's buoyancy in stock markets was, of course, quantitative easing.
He embraced the idea of quantitative easing, which involves increasing the money supply in order to stimulate economic activity.
Credit easing and infrastructure investment are the much-trumpeted centrepieces of the autumn statement, yet we and business organisations had been calling for the government to bring forward infrastructure investment and to improve credit conditions for small businesses for many months.
UK bond yields are low because growth is so appalling that the markets have no expectation that the monetary policy committee will be able to raise interest rates for years, and because we have our own central bank that can initiate quantitative easing.
On growth, there was thin gruel indeed – the headline proposals on "credit easing" will require lots more explaining – and by announcing that Britain will cut carbon emissions "no faster" than any other European country, he has shredded the original Cameron slogan of "Vote Blue, Go Green" and surely picked a fight with the Tories' Lib Dem partners.
But the introduction of data-driven policies in 2007, backed by evidence-based probation and easing punishments for parole breaches, instantly proved a success.
His comments come amid signs from Threadneedle Street that it would restart its quantitative easing programme over the coming months.
The UK needs a working banking sector, because that is how the bulk of our SMEs fund themselves and the best chance of success for the chancellor's credit easing is for it to encourage the banks to lend.
Quantitative easing, coupled with low interest rates, freed up capital in the US and encouraged a steady rise in risk appetite amid the Fed's ultra-supportive monetary policy.
Encouraged to be proactive, the Bank of England kept interest rates at 0.5%, created money through the quantitative easing programme and in 2012 came up with Funding for Lending, under which banks could get access to cut-price funds provided they increased business or mortgage lending.
