Johannesburg — IT's nearly Christmas, which means it's time to count our blessings. There is one blessing that we should be thankful for above all, and that is the global economic rebound. You get a strong sense that South Africans are only dimly aware of how close to the edge of a very real cliff the global motorcar has been speeding .

In fact, the 2008-09 recession was a real game- changer, as they say . Think of what has changed in the past year and you get a clearer sense of this .

First, the financial superstructure of our world has proven much more fragile than we thought. The post Soviet era saw the emergence of a Brave New World driven by a global consensus about the broad parameters of generally accepted economics. Free trade and free markets won the day and fostered a hitherto unknown level of international agreement about the sensible structure for any normal economy.

So strong was this sense of agreement that it almost became an ethic, or a set of articles of faith which could be decreed from on high by organisations such as the International Monetary Fund and the Economist magazine.

The 2008- 09 recession shattered that consensus. Just because the level of agreement was more widespread did not mean it was more immutable than previous versions. It turns out that more people believing a thing does not make it more right, which is something we should have known from the start. The size of the global financial framework, now so gloriously enlarged, does not negate the foundation on which it is built . And that foundation remains what it always was -- greed, vanity, stupidity and other glories of human nature.

The great moment of the 2008-09 recession will be those precious few days when Absa 's market capitalisation was higher than Barclays Bank, which of course owns half of Absa. Think about what that means: the market was valuing one of the oldest banks in the world at less than the fairly recent amalgamation of five South African financial institutions, which itself had to be saved from bankruptcy only a few decades ago.

So why does the surprising fragility of our Brave New World turn out to be a blessing? I guess the speed of the recovery means, or may mean, that our ability to address even harsh economic downturns is now much improved. You bite your tongue a little bit when you say that but, at the very least, the "V"-shaped recovery was something of a surprise. If that is the case, then surely we can claim, even if we hesitate to do so, that the policy decisions in response to the crisis were broadly correct.

There is a lot of room for argument here, because every aspect of this debate is relative. Perhaps the problems were not so deep as we first thought. Perhaps the free-flow of liquidity, which is not something any government would necessarily oppose, has merely acted as a stop-gap measure, and another downturn is around the corner. Who knows? The fact is that we have been visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past and he was not as scary as we thought.

The second major change is that anyone who lived under the impression that the world was not a global entity is now surely dispossessed of their delusion. A clear indicator of the interconnected global economy happened just last Friday. The JSE jumped 300 points, the gold price fell, the rand weakened -- all because the US unemployment rate came in, not at the expected 10,2%, but 10%.

The speed with which the actions of other states affect everyone else is both marvellous and terrifying. Perhaps we were always subject to these forces, but the difference is that in the past year it has become so much more apparent. Globalisation is no longer the terrain of inflated journalists, nouveau-left activists and economic theoreticians. It is us.

The third blessing of the past period is what might be called the Ghost of Christmas Future, to mix a literary metaphor. SA's new government is bizarrely similar to previous African National Congress governments -- riven by the same fractious arguments, still as unwittingly corrupt, still making up policy on the hoof, as dexterous and as encouragingly adept.

For those our blessings, strange as they are, may we be truly thankful.

Cohen is a freelance writer.