While America’s economy has technically been out of recession for six years, it is only relatively recently that the recovery has started to make itself felt at a grassroots level.

The number of long-term unemployed, those who simply gave up looking for work because there was none to be found, has dropped by fully a fifth in the last year as millions of new jobs have been created.

Wages are rising, slowly but incrementally. Lower oil prices are helping to stimulate consumer confidence and increased spending.

If the American economy is not actually thriving, it is showing the first signs of long-term and sustained growth since it touched bottom in 2009 with a poleaxed stock market and record unemployment figures.

For the first time in five years, public spending as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) has increased in the US. Taking a page out of the Keynesian playbook, Washington is borrowing and investing more at home to try to provide a sustained boost to the recovering but still wobbly economy.

With interest rates at historic lows, there is certainly no shortage of cheap money available for the type of vigorous infrastructure financing the US is now pursuing.

While prospects have brightened considerably in America in recent months according to almost every economic indicator, the scene continues to be mired in darkness in Bermuda.

It is historically unprecedented, of course, for an uptick in American economic activity not to be reflected in local market conditions. But that is the case now. It will remain the case until Bermuda accepts that it must start to live within its now substantially reduced means.

This will require the Island to put structural reforms into place which are as unavoidable as they are unpalatable to a great many Bermudians. But without meaningful economic restructuring, Bermuda will never be in a position to put its finances back on a genuinely sustainable footing

The Island’s proximity to the US and the fact its media shapes so many of our own daily perceptions has inevitably created something of a chasm between local expectations of an imminent Bermudian resurgence and the ongoing, deeply entrenched realities of our economic situation.

Those who are gleefully pointing to a newly buoyant America’s reinvestment in itself as a model for the Bermuda Government to follow are turning a wilfully blind eye to the hard facts of our economic circumstances.

The fact is Bermuda’s fiscal implosion owed as much to poor forward planning, myopic tax and immigration policies and an ultimately unsustainable economic growth model as it did to the global financial crisis of 2007-2008.

Today the Bermuda job market remains stagnant. Wage growth is flat. The promise of massive new infrastructure investment in the hospitality sector in the run-up to the 2017 America’s Cup has yet to translate into shovel-ready projects.

And with Mergers & Acquisitions the way of the short-term future in the re/insurance field, no significant growth can be expected in the once buoyant offshore sector.

So Government’s recent Budget was, by necessity, a textbook exercise in belt-tightening. There can be no borrowing and spending our way out of stubbornly intractable recessionary conditions, not when Government is already using loans to meet its top-heavy payroll.

Public spending as a proportion of GDP shrank for 2014/15. It will have to continue to shrink in the years to come.

For the loans the Island is now dependent on simply to meets its short-term obligations will not continue to be forthcoming from the international markets unless Government begins to meet its promised targets for comprehensive and substantive spending cuts.

This will, by necessity, involve the privatising and outsourcing of some Government services, a cap on civil service hiring and a likely overhaul of public sector pension schemes.

The pool of cheap money America is now drawing on to reinvest in itself is simply not available to Bermuda.

If our international credit rating is lowered again — something which will happen should we continue to balk at making the necessary structural reforms to our economy — then even borrowing expensive money may soon become a prohibitively costly option for the Island.