Really? Logically speaking you must be right, but I haven't seen much evidence. Does the recession look different from New Zealand?

Yes for thes reasons:

1. The NZ banks were more stringent in their due diligence before offering loans during the credit boom years than elsewhere.

2. The agricultural nature of the economy means there is a permanent production baseline.

3. NZ partially benefits from the strength of the Australian economy, which is booming due to its large mining sector.

The result is that there is money around but investment opportunities for it are thin on the ground.

Another factor is that the present government, for all its fault, is managing the country's indebtedness very well, without requiring austerity measures.

Interesting. Meanwhile, in the UK, hundreds of thousands of people are effectively being forced into becoming entrepreneurs, funded only by their redundancy packages.

Given that the banks are not investing in UK businesses right now, I guess one way forward is for those new entrepreneurs to group together into teams and pool their resources. For the majority of the world's population for the majority of history, life is and has been incredibly tough. In the developed West in the recent past, we have been insulated from the worst of this but we are now experiencing something of what most of the world has always lived with.

As is often the case, I think the big problem is matching up the ideas, the manpower and the money. In boom times, the person with an idea gets money from a bank to hire the manpower, but in a recession, the three get separated.
I agree with you about the general toughness of life, and that's why I'm not relaxed about this recession -- there is no rule of nature that a recession will be followed automatically by a strong upturn, and neither will life always get better and better.
Boris Johnson said it quite well (telegraph.co.uk "history teaches us that the tide can suddenly and inexplicably go out, and that things can lurch backwards into darkness and squalor and appalling violence." (Do read the full quote!)

Here's an interesting article

I think we're just going to have to get used to a long long period of economic stagnation ...

I think we're living in the age of the metropolises -- because so many people have to change job every few years, and because so many people have a spouse with an equally important career, it's essential to live in a place with as many jobs on offer as possible. For instance, when I lost my job at Collins, getting an equivalent job was almost impossible without leaving Newton Mearns, so Complexli was founded; if I had lived in London, Paris, New York or Ruhrstadt, there would probably have been plenty of reasonable job offers to choose from. I therefore think it's naïve to think Birmingham or Manchester can just copy London without any assistance (e.g., lower the business rates outwith London, or move Parliament to York).