So that's all right then. Almost a year into the worst recession to afflict Britain and the West since the Second World War and we are, say the optimists, over the worst. “The End” is no longer nigh but, suddenly, the end of the slump is. In the barren desert of economic gloom an oasis of hope, lush with “green shoots”, at last shimmers on the horizon.

Or does it? Alas these rose-tinted visions of a rapid revival from recession are almost certainly a cruel mirage. For fearful families, fretful businesses, edgy investors, and — most of all — tormented financiers and desperate politicians, all craving a swift return to the good times, the present chorus of upbeat and reassuring responses to the persistent question “are we nearly there yet?” is little more than wishful thinking.

Sure, there are the first, tentative signs that the vicious first phase of this wrenchingly brutal recession may be passing. The pace of the slump in the present quarter, here and across the world, is likely to be markedly less than the headlong plunge of the past six months. The massive response by governments and central banks, pretty much unprecedented in scale and speed, ought to have begun to slow the rate of decline — and seems to have done so. That much is welcome. But, crucially, we are still going down, and quite fast.

The yearning for the economy to “get well” this soon is wholly understandable. Yet to claim that recovery is already at hand is akin to arguing that the patient is out of danger when moved from intensive care to the “high-dependency unit”. The painful fact is that economies are far from out of danger.

A true recovery will eventually emerge. The huge doses of interest rate cuts, fiscal stimulus, and all the rest will stabilise the patient.

The big problem, however, is that while these remedies are starting to work, they amount to a quick fix rather than a long-term cure, treating the distressing symptoms of recession rather than the underlying disease. If the treatment is more of a palliative than a panacea, then the danger is that recovery could mean remission followed by relapse.

There are at least three big causes for concern that governments' approach means that economies are only being patched up for the short-term rather than made fit to ensure long-term prosperity. Two of these are more immediately pressing, the third is less so, but is fundamental and imperative.

The first worry — explored compellingly here yesterday by George Magnus — is that, particularly in Britain and the US, existing policies to clean up and recapitalise banks that remain semi-paralysed by an enormous overhang of “toxic” debts are far too piecemeal and limited to resolve the problem.

The second anxiety is that the toll being taken on economies' future productive potential by the sheer scale of global recession will mean that when growth does resume it will be only anaemic. As the slump drags on, companies will scrap capacity, as well as planned investment in more efficient future production; economies' skills-base will be eroded as job losses spiral. And the vast bills for bank bailouts and fiscal stimulus mean that higher taxes will hamstring future growth. All of this risks ensuring that eventual recovery will be insipid.

But it is the third worry that is the gravest, most complex and most intractable. As Stephen Roach, of Morgan Stanley, highlights in a recent article for McKinsey, the consultancy, the most disturbing facet of the response to this crisis is that leaders of the key economies have so far failed utterly to confront the titanic, deep-seated global economic imbalances that lie at the root of the world's present plight.

Instead, leaders have focused their energies on damage limitation. Yet by doing so, and by failing to address the big picture, they risk perpetuating forces that will be permanently and profoundly destabilising.

It is to these notorious “imbalances” that we can trace the origins of the catastrophic bust being endured in the US. On one side of the imbalance, America spent most of the last decade on a runaway binge of excessive consumption, fuelled by an unsustainable boom in house prices and a credit bubble inflated by cheap money.

On the other side of what turned out to be a Faustian pact sits China. A Chinese savings boom as excessive as the US consumer binge provided the ultimate source of the cheap cash that Americans proved so eager to spend on cheap imported Chinese goods. As long as China's exports boomed, Beijing was happy to finance a ballooning American trade deficit by buying ever greater quantities of US Treasury bonds. In turn, as China piled up these seemingly limitless quantities of dollars, it kept its exchange rate low, its products cheap - and Americans eager to buy. And Americans' access to the ever-bigger borrowings needed to keep on buying was subsidised, too, as China's T-bond buying kept down US market interest rates.

As Mr Roach observes, that great game is now over. Yet both Washington and Beijing still seem intent on trying to press the reset button and resume playing. US measures to fight the recession are concentrated on shoring up and reviving consumption. In China, efforts are focused on infrastructure investment to enhance the country's ability to produce rather than stimulate the higher levels of consumer demand needed if the world economy is to “rebalance”.

If these policies are expedient for the moment, as a prescription for a return to long-term global economic health they are liable to prove disastrous. This is the urgent challenge to which both America and China must rise.

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