We are all used to two-for-one offers in the new year sales. Who hasn't occasionally snagged a sweater or suit he didn't really need but was too tempted by a bargain? But a truck?

In what seems like an almost desperate attempt to revive collapsing sales, a Chrysler dealer in Florida is starting 2009 by offering customers a free extra truck with every new Ram they buy. It is, surely, some sort of testament to America's love of big wheels or just evidence of the irresistible lure of a bargain, but it is evidently working. They'd sold more than 40 by last weekend.

The two-truck family may be the latest symptom of the current recession. Retail prospects look so grim that, simply in order to survive, businesses are coming up with all kinds of innovative offers. Two-for-one is actually rather passé. Now it's three-for-one on men's suits and discounts for almost everything in department stores.

The most striking offer, though, and one that at least promises to get to the heart of the crisis is the one unveiled by Hyundai last week. The South Korean carmaker is promising that if you buy one of its cars now and then lose your income in the next year, you can return the car and get your money back.

There's no word yet on whether this deal is attracting much business, but it highlights the basic challenge facing the United States - an historic loss of confidence. Consumers are reluctant to spend, especially on big-ticket items such as cars, because they worry that their incomes will drop sharply. With unemployment highly likely to rise towards 10 per cent in 2009, the fear of joblessness is all too likely to be realised for many Americans. Understandably, caution is the guiding principle.

Furthermore, for years American consumers have lived beyond the means provided by their incomes. They have been able to do this thanks to substantial increases in the values of their homes and the financial assets that will support them in retirement.

But we all know that the value of those investments has slumped in the past two years. Instead of comfortably drawing on unrealised savings to spend, consumers must now replenish savings in order to get by.

This is what makes the crisis so challenging. The US, Britain and much of the world confront a set of economic circumstances that is almost unprecedented in its complexity. We have not just a common or garden cyclical downturn but a once-in-a-century housing slump, which is destroying wealth, a financial crisis, which is squeezing credit, but also we are in the early stages of an overdue adjustment in household balance sheets.

What is the prognosis as the new year gets under way?

Policy is set to be as stimulative as it has probably ever been.

The US is now a temporary resident of Financial Acronymia, a friendly land where free money is the objective of all government programmes with long names.

At the Federal Reserve, the combination of Zirp (zero interest rate policy) and QE (quantitative easing) will provide the liquidity that is a necessary but not sufficient condition of recovery. Further disbursements from the Tarp (troubled asset relief programme) will keep providing capital for banks.

Then, of course, there will be the Arrp, the American recovery and reinvestment plan, the working title for Barack Obama's near-trillion-dollar fiscal stimulus.

Let's not dwell too long on the failures of government measures in the past year, which are certainly manifold and have helped to make matters much worse. Let's instead hope that now, finally, the right combination is somehow in place, or soon will be.

What we know is that the main problem with all these policies is how you unwind them once the crisis is past. But that's a problem we would dearly love to have, not one we have right now.

How long will it be before we get to that happy state of affairs when too much stimulus is our worry, not too little?

Put it this way. Don't be surprised if 2009 ends with the same sort of two-for-one truck deal with which it began.

gerardbaker@thetimes.co.uk

Times Recommends

• C&G axed - 1,660 jobs to be lost
• UK house prices rise 1.1% as buyers return
• Mixed reaction to US banks repaying bailouts