The economy is a daunting thing for most people, not only are econ majors usually really, blood-boilingly insufferable, but the big wigs running the show love dressing up what’s going on in smoke and mirrors that make the whole thing seem like some calculated circus act: There are ups and downs and we will, eventually, land on our feet!

But we’re fucked!

It would certainly be in fashion for me to serve you platitudes about how the bourgeoise want to totally gape us and leave us shivering in the damp and cold only for the bourgeoise (but wearing red this time!) to offer a sliver of space by the fireplace, but I think it’s better if we crunch the numbers and look at the graphs that are out there and see if we really are that fucked, if we are – as Labour’s finance spokesperson Barbara Davis claims – on the edge of a recession.

This graph from (from stats NZ) shows that GDP has dropped 0.9% in the June quarter, a lot worse than what the big banks were expecting, which was an already dismal –0.4%. Obviously, these banks’ ‘Uncertain Vibes’ were more than justified, and if anything, they were too optimistic.

So what does finance minister Nicola Willis have to say about this? Well, it’s Trump’s fault, obviously. Is it really, though? Australia, Japan, and other countries faced similar levels of tariffs as we did, but they’re all better off than us:

Canada faced 35% tariffs, by the way, and their GDP only fell to the level that our big banks were expecting ours to.
So what’s up with the blame game? Obviously, blame is very useful, it gets the people who want you to actually do your job and tidy up the economy to look elsewhere. Whether it’s to the past government, or to foreign interference, National doesn’t seem to have the chutzpah to admit where they’ve fucked up.

WHERE THEY’VE FUCKED UP

The public sector has been gutted and bled like a fish, and you can smell the fishiness on the government’s lips every time they serve us something about why we’re doing so badly. About 9,520 jobs cut in the public sector, the majority from the health sector, are workers that aren’t paying tax anymore.

That’s just the public sector: Factory and mill closures are becoming more and more common place, and with each worker forced onto jobseeker and made to navigate the state of the job market, that’s more money the government is spending and not getting back in taxes. You don’t need to have studied Econ to figure out why this is a load of hooey.
This whole ordeal – on top of every other clusterfuck that Luxon has overseen – has created a ceaseless feast of schadenfreude for Matthew Hooton who wrote a whole piece for The Herald about how totally miserable the state of things are, insisting that the only way for this government to last and for us to avoid – what he calls ‘the catastrophe of’ – a Labor and Greens coalition government is if Luxon resigns. Now, sure, Hooton is probably a little bitter about the fact he backed the wrong egg shaped National leader, but his bitterness is revealing; in that, it shows that the privileged who expected to reap endless benefits from National’s plan to “get us back on track” (remember that?) are growing a little upset realising that there was never a train to get on. Only, as Donnie might say, ‘Concepts of a train.’

BUT ARE WE REALLY GOING TO RECESS?

If the way people are dressing and the feverish cannibalising of the past isn’t enough to prove Barbara Davis right, we should figure out what it’ll take to get us into a recession, and how many toes we have dipped into that septic pool right now.

A recession in New Zealand is identified as two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth.

So… Are we about to leap in?
We never left the pool! We never even began to grab the towel! That’s why I can’t understand Hipkins going on Facebook and saying we’re on the verge of ‘yet another recession’, we never left the first one, it’s just getting worse. And we’re not just recessing economically, we’re bleeding people, the future looks stillborn for so many young kiwis that are fleeing to Aussie which, as mentioned before, is not so deep in shit as we are.

What do we do to fix this? Kowtow to Australia and finally let them stake claim in us? Vote NACTFirst out next year? I don’t know, I really don’t know. I think anybody telling us that there is a way for our – or any – Western nation to escape this is peddling economic snake oil.