Do you want the bad news or the tabloid pap?

The economy is in a dire place, the RBA is feeling compelled to act as best it can to apply CPR to the twitching patient. Every cut in rates is just another clue to the depth of despair around the RBA board table. Of course, that’s not how they see it in tabloid newspaper land. Oh no. From each according to their capacity to pay, to each according to the newspaper they read. Here’s today’s Herald Sun, battler’s friend:

INTEREST rates may drop another 1 per cent in an early Christmas spending present for households as the RBA aims to avert a recession.

There’s only one way rates are heading, and that’s down down, deeper and down, as Francis Rossi might have put it. And that’s no Christmas present, that’s a grim portent. Readers of papers that couch grim news in such dissembling pap, should rise up and demand something closer to the truth. It’s a measure of just what a cynical exercise in faux camaraderie tabloid publishing is.

3 Comments

  1. Mark Duffett
    Posted November 19, 2008 at 2:17 pm | Permalink

    What is an interest rate cut announcement supposed to be if not a piece of good news intended to stimulate spending? Is it so bad that the tabloids’ presentation happens to be congruent with the Reserve Bank’s aims? I think you need to look a bit closer to home to see who’s being excessively cynical.

  2. martin english
    Posted November 20, 2008 at 4:50 pm | Permalink

    More to the point, presenting it as a christmas present to be spent quickly, will have a more positrive effect on the economy than winging about how bad off we are.

    And, no, we shouldn’t be in “depths of despair around the RBA board table” – that is assuming that they have corporate memories longer than 15 years. As pascoe said the other day in the Age, harden the f up

  3. Albert Ross
    Posted November 21, 2008 at 12:15 am | Permalink

    Can’t be all bad. A client manufactures cubbies. Customers have been acomin’ aclutchin’ their bonuses and petrol savin’s and buyin’ the kiddies a lovely chirssie pressie. First time ever he has to close of chrissie cubby orders in November.

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