It depends what time scale you're looking at. If you consider the US government's reaction to the events of 2008 a success because the stock market is high right now and unemployment is low, that would be misleading if the effects take an even longer timeframe to show themselves.

The Austrian economists would argue that what happened in 2008 was a breakdown of the fiat monetary system and that the responses were just bandaids. In the longer-term view, when you look at shifts in power and rising and falling of empires, 2008 could be the first of many massive shocks to the economy.