Everyone in business wants to know when is this misery going to end? We are frightened not by what has already occurred, but by the gloomiest predictions of a prolonged period of recession.

As an island, our dependence on others has always been an economic challenge and our special relationship with the US has been central to all we have achieved. The taoiseach's announcement last week that he has ordered a review of that relationship is more important than it might appear.

Hours earlier Ben Bernanke, US Federal Reserve chief, said he thought the world's economic problems would start to turn at the end of this year. When the problems first manifested themselves courtesy of the subprime difficulties in the US in summer 2007, most people thought we would already be through the worst by now. No one anticipated then – and still cannot fully comprehend – the sheer scale and complexity of the woes that have befallen almost every single economy in the world.

Most of us born in the first half of the last century have experienced recessions before. We have seen their effects – the personal hardship for those out of work, the trauma of family members being forced to emigrate and the general destruction of optimism. Experience would tell us that they are normally 24- or 30-month phenomena but all the portents for this recession suggest that we might well be in for a longer battle.

This is not to be negative. In dealing with the reality of our problem we need to assess the scale of the difficulty objectively.

In recessionary times there are markets that continue to grow and develop. A global recession of the scale we are currently facing is highly unusual. The other worrying element is the extent of the damage to the financial markets, that very piece of the economic architecture on which we are most dependent to fuel the engine of activity.

Bernanke is shrewd. He is not seen as someone who would lightly boost market perception or confidence without having a genuine belief in his assertions about the economic crisis "bottoming out" at the end of this year. He rarely gives one-to-one interviews so his decision to talk with CBS suggests a very deliberate decision to indicate that the Fed believes 2009 should see us through the worst of the crisis.

While it was cautiously offered it also came following a substantive positive move by the markets over the last three days of the previous week and it must, therefore, have been even more calculated.

This is good news. It came too when Ireland's political delegations, north and south, were together in the United States to promote our cause in cities that represent important trading areas for this island. It came against a backdrop of growing concern in the United States that the assumed Obama factor had not yet had any impact and that the new president was not being decisive enough.

The welfare of the US economy is important to the welfare of the whole world but it is most particularly so to this small island. So let us hope that Bernanke's optimism is well placed.

I keep a reasonably close eye on general economic commentary in the US and read somewhere recently that total US debt as a percentage of GDP remained stable from the 1950s to the 1980s at 150%. In the mid 1990s this ratio began a steep increase which saw it reach about 350% by 2008. I understand that the debt-to-GDP ratio in the US during the Great Depression peaked at 300%, so what does a figure higher than that tell us about the state of the US economy?

I am not an economist but, to my untrained eye the only surprise, given these statistics, is that it took as long as it did for the US economy to implode and that, when it comes to the financial markets, the problems were so fundamental and so deep that a transformation of the financial services industry was always going to be required.

Ireland and the US are joined at the hip, economically and spiritually. The fate of the US has such a profound effect on this small island that the longer it is dealing with an economic crisis the more difficult it is for us to manage our way out of our own predicament.

Most people have moved beyond the immediate trauma associated with the redundancies and the massive difficulties in getting paid and keeping your business afloat. They now want to know how long this is going to last. I believe all of them would effectively "write off" 2009 if they felt things would start to turn early in 2010. I know I would.