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I’m titillated by the term ‘technical recession’ being bandied about the state of the economy. It’s a bit like ‘technical pregnancy’: you either are or are not experiencing one. We are. We’re in a recession and it behoves those with a public voice to speak to that fact. To say it loud and clear: the economy is shrinking, our trade balances are worsening, there is no magic pot of money to pretend it away – and yet they do not. They prevaricate – ‘technical recession’ – as if it’s not really happening.
RNZ pretends, “Two consecutive quarters of negative growth (a paradox surely) is called a technical recession, a definition devised in the mid-1970s by a US bureaucrat, Julius Shiskin”. This is not correct; there was no “technical” in Shiskin’s definition, only “recession”: our economy has been that way in four of the last five quarters, testimony to the great and good giant of finances; Grant Robertson, recently retired.
Here in Wellingrad the nongs haven’t got the message; they’re technically stupid. Crying out for higher rates, higher taxes, money for this, money for that, money for Jim and money for Jam, ‘cos taxes fix everything. I despair. But there is hope on the horizon. The local rag announces that as well as running out of money, we’re running out of rocks:
I have a win-win solution: there are thousands upon thousands of Pollyanna, hard-lefty, Greens in this hamlet; tens of thousands in fact; if we could just shake the rocks from their heads we could unburden them of the notion money grows on trees, and there’d be piles of rock freed from their cranial prisons, veritable mountains, to break down and sell for aggregates and roading, certifiably organic too, so should fetch a premium.
Sometimes I’m too genius for my own good.
