The worst economic crisis of a lifetime happen under his watch. But he did do one thing at the very end which saved the day. He spent a ton of money.Combined with Obama's stimulus and other policies we are seeing the economy slowly start to turn around.

Yet if Rudd praises Obama, he also praises Bush for acting swiftly when the global economy began coming apart in the fall of 2008. As Rudd put it in a speech to the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue, Bush acted in dire circumstances, at a moment when "global financial flows ground to a virtual halt."

In fact, for all the flaws in the execution of the bank bailout program, Bush's willingness last fall to put the urgent need for massive action over his own ideological proclivities is likely to go down as the most enduringly constructive act of his presidency.

Rudd argues that in the last months of Bush's administration and the first months of Obama's, every economic indicator pointed to "catastrophe." He speaks of banks running out of money, developers whose credit was frozen and signs of panic among individual savers.

What prevented a repeat of the 1930s, he says, is that the world's governments actually learned from that era, particularly from "the deliberations on the Great Depression by John Maynard Keynes." The British economist stressed the imperative of government action at moments when the private economy falters.