Have you ever noticed how annual reports so often refer to ‘issues’ instead of ‘problems’? This infuriating substitution was brought to mind recently while I was reading how Ana Botin had berated Britons for their “glass half-empty” view of life in a speech at an Institute of Directors conference.

The Spanish chief executive of Santander UK is of the belief that British pessimism and “grumbling” is hampering the UK’s economic recovery.

My immediate response was: “It is a bit rich for any banker to preach on such matters, given the pivotal role her industry played in creating the very problems that have left us feeling a tad despondent.”

I then found myself coming to the defence of ‘pessimism’ in general — perhaps because I live in a country which does not enjoy as much sunshine as the Costa del Sol.

I firmly believe a dose of pessimism in business and financial dealings is healthy, mindful of Woody Allen’s prescient words: “Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem.”

The banking industry would certainly have benefited from taking a more jaundiced view of matters in the early part of this century.

Cautious thinking plays an important role in the corporate world, often keeping the reality deniers in check. Every organisation should heed the voice of the pessimist in order to achieve the right mix of daring and caution.

It is a more difficult balance to achieve than you might imagine — certainly in America it seems.

“It has gotten to the point where people really feel pressure to think and talk in an optimistic way,” B Cade Massey, an assistant professor in organisational behaviour at Yale School of Management, told MIT Sloan Management Review.

The difficulty is that the debate between optimism and pessimism tends to be oversimplified, especially in the corporate world — if you are optimistic, good things get done, while if you are pessimistic there is no escaping the bad.The banking crisis of 2008 did much to intensify the British sense of pessimism, though this is hardly our default position.

The current recovery in consumer optimism — which seems to fly in the face of Ms Botin’s claims — is attributable primarily to long-awaited job creation and self-imposed household austerity, according JGFR’s John Gilbert.

“There is little evidence of the banks playing a big role in generating optimism,” he said in a recent website posting.

“They have been beset by ongoing mis-selling scandals with the £16bn or so of PPI claims helping to boost household finances and big-ticket purchases such as cars. Santander has in fact held back this past year in mortgage lending although it is set to switch its mortgage tap back on.”

According to Mr Gilbert, UK consumers are the most optimistic of the major European countries, coming in ahead of Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and France. Denmark (27.9) is the most optimistic European country; Greece the least.

Let us hope this burgeoning confidence does not get us into trouble again.

Perhaps the best safeguard against this danger is “defensive pessimism,” a term coined by psychology professors Julie Norem and Nancy Cantor, of Wellesley College in Massachusetts, back in the 1980s.

Or as it would no doubt be referred to in annual reports: “cautious optimism.”