Let us give thanks to the Americans for a change.

The world was quick to attack America for its irresponsible lending to people who could not afford it and who precipitated the financial crash in 2008.

The American financial system sneezed and everyone caught a cold. The bailout that followed let all the miscreants off the hook, (apart from the token Lehman Bros.) and thus made it easier for another crash to happen again. This failure to punish financial mismanagement has simply hidden the problem, which next time, may rear up and really give the world pneumonia.

America deserves all the criticism it got, and is still getting for this evasion of fiscal responsibility.

However, while the rest of the world is still grumpy about the fallout from the crisis, it should reflect on the huge financial benefits that have accrued to them by another American action.

Fracking or Oil from Shale mining.

The precipitous drop in the oil price recently enjoyed by the whole world, is entirely due to the Americans running with the ball on shale oil and gas, providing themselves and everyone else with massive foreign exchange savings and huge corporate and personal savings for every fuel user on the planet.

Naturally, there are a few walking wounded resulting from this price war. These are the oil producing nations of the world.

Luckily, these nations are usually so corrupt and led by utterly selfish leaders, who steal most of the income from the oil they produce, that the populations of these countries are unlikely to suffer any more than they usually do, because of the falling oil prices.

For the rest of us, the increase in disposable income has been a great boon. Countries that have been spending more than they should, can, if prudent, take advantage of this lower price to raise fuel taxes while still passing on real and impressive savings to the end users, their voters.

There is some downside to this bonanza. Firstly, the drop in oil price has had the effect of making many fracking operations uneconomic. It has also made exploration for oil less attractive. This has resulted in a much lower level of activity in these sectors.

In South Africa, we have seen that this disincentive, coupled to government’s greed in moving the goalposts with regard to energy companies, has completely killed our fledgling fracking and off-shore oil exploration attempts.

Secondly, our oil from coal giant SASOL is taking quite a knock. South Africans can be excused a degree of shadenfreude in this regard because SASOL has for many years basked in the luxury of import price parity. They have been allowed to charge the same price for their fuel as the price paid for fully imported fuel, plus the transport costs thereof.

This has meant that SASOL has profited greatly from the rocketing oil prices of yesteryear, without passing any of these windfall profits back to South African fuel users, who had paid to build SASOL in the first place.

While these unintended consequences are a little painful to those feeling the pinch, they have another hidden benefit. They leave a lot of fuel of one type or another in the ground for the hard times which will invariable come, sometime in the future.

So, lets hear it for the Americans. We are so used to berating them for their many weaknesses and mistakes, both domestic and abroad, that we need to stop demonizing them and, for once in our ungrateful lives, give a heartfelt vote of thanks to the land of the free and the home of the brave.