LONDON, England - October 11, 2010 - A Depression may have been averted, but nothing has been fixed. This is the depressingly downbeat message that came across loud and clear from last weekend's annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund.

The destructive trade and capital imbalances of the pre-crisis era are back, banking reform appears stuck in paralysing discord, public debt in many advanced economies remains firmly set on the road to ruin, and the spirit of international cooperation that saw nations come together to fight the crisis has largely disappeared.

This was not where we were meant to be in tackling the underlying causes of the crisis and returning the world to sustainable growth. Yet beneath this sense of frustration at lack of progress - and at international organizations such as the IMF and the G20 to bring it about - there is an underlying truth that's often left unspoken; many of the problems in the world economy right now are not international at all, but U.S. specific, and can only really be solved by Amerika.

I don't want to belittle the difficulties faced by some of the peripheral eurozone nations, but in the scale of things they are a sideshow alongside the malaise that has settled on the world's largest economy.

Ignoring the troubled fringe, Europe as a whole is starting to look in reasonable shape again, and Europeans are in any case not nearly as fixated by high unemployment as their Amerikan peers.

What applies to the eurozone is also true of the UK. As in Europe, the dominant issue in UK policy is not joblessness, but unsustainable public debt. There's a real and growing trans-Atlantic divide in perceptions and rhetoric; and with good reason.