It looks that way from the latest events and statistics. Output from the car industry is down 60 percent year-on-year. The goods-vehicle firm LDV is on the brink of bankruptcy. Tata, the Indian group that bought Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford, is seeking more than $3 billion in government loan guarantees. Vauxhall, the British wing of General Motors, is seeking $5 billion from European governments to save Vauxhall and Opel, the German wing, along with its various plants in Spain and elsewhere.

New technology is not looking in great shape to replace the old. The British Wind Energy Association last week told the government that without another $3 billion in government cash, there would be no chance of financing the planned new wind farms, supposed to take advantage of Britain's potential as the windiest place in Europe.

And one of the more hopeful of Britain's alternative-energy technologies, the Pelamis wave-energy system, was towed broken back to shore last week with what looks like a big mechanical problem that casts doubt over its future.

Britain, which was even more dependent on a swollen financial sector and enjoyed an even bigger housing bubble than the United States and whose consumers went even further into debt than their American cousins, is going through hard times. Manufacturing output is down more than 12 percent year-on-year, government debt is climbing to a peacetime record, and the trade deficit is still well more than $2 billion a week.

As Prime Minister Gordon Brown prepares to host the April 2 financial summit of the G20 countries, Britain looks to be on the ropes -- with very few signs of green shoots that may signal recovery. Unemployment is rising at a rate of 140,000 people a month, slightly faster than in the United States by proportion to population.

However, there was one curious feature of the unemployment statistics. In February 2009, 359,500 Britons lost jobs, but another 249,700 people found new jobs. In February 2008, by contrast, only 208,000 found new jobs. So even though unemployment is rising fast, more new jobs are being created.

The fall in housing prices seems to have stopped, and in some areas of London there are even reports of prices rising again, probably driven by the low level of interest rates.

Some new technologies seem to be showing real promise, like the underwater pollution sensor that looks like a carp, swims around like a carp sniffing the water quality and then returns home to its docking port every day to recharge its batteries. Dubbed Fish 'n' Microchips, it came from the robotics lab at the University of Essex, and five are now being built for a Spanish harbor.

And even though the London stock market is down by more than 40 percent and banks are still deeply reluctant to lend money, credit is not dead in this credit crunch. It has simply changed its form. Credit is available through the corporate bond market, which is -- and there is only one word for it -- booming.

The big beneficiary has been Barclays, the British-owned bank that bought the rump of Lehman Brothers and is now the top issuer of corporate bonds in both the United States and Britain. The corporate bond market this year is running at more than $120 billion a month, and the availability of funds serves as a reminder that vast sums of money are still pouring into pension funds and insurance companies each month and that money needs to find profitable homes.

Naturally it's the big companies that find it easiest to tap this market, with Pfizer and Roche, Shell and BP, Heineken and Chevron all raising funds in recent weeks. But they have suppliers down the food chain, and the very fact that credit is available again is a hopeful sign.

It is not the only one. The Bank of England has suddenly started to sound almost cheerful about the prospects for recovery next year. The bank's chief economist, Spencer Dale, suggested Friday that the worst might be over.

"A substantial amount of the total contraction (in the economy) we're going to see has come through," Dale said. He also noted there was a "possibility of some signs of recovery by the turn of the year."

Only a month ago, the bank was forecasting that the British economy could by the end of this year be suffering a 4 percent to 6 percent fall year-on-year. The difference is apparently the introduction of the bank's new policy of "quantitative easing." Modeled on one of the remedies devised by Japan to get out of its 1990s stagnation, this refers to the way the bank has started to bring down longer-term interest rates by buying treasury bonds.

This also means printing money, and many economists fear that this expansion of the money supply by the Bank of England and the U.S. Federal Reserve signals an inevitable wave of inflation in the future. It may not look like it now, with British retail process set to fall 0.8 percent this week and the headlines predicting "a yearlong battle with deflation," but when recovery comes, inflation is almost sure to follow.

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