Media response: Wahhhh! I want a recession

After all, everyone else has got one mummy.

The media is at its rancid worst this morning bemoaning the technical absence of a recession when everyone reeaalllly knows the whole place is f#cked.

Ross Gittins defends his right to call it a recession no matter what the data say. Interestingly, a week ago he was writing on the need for positive thinking and the Government’s cleverness in spinning it’s budget message to accentuate the positive.

Last week he also said: “We’re still in the phony war stage of the recession, where everyone uses the word but we’ve yet to see much evidence of it in unemployment.” But today? Whoa, what happened Ross?

The acid test for recession is not quarterly movements in gross domestic product, it’s what’s happening to unemployment. This has risen by 1.5 percentage points in 14 months. That’s more than 160,000 extra people without jobs. Not in recession did you say?

Actually, I think you pointed us in that direction, Ross. From not much evidence of it to burgeoning jobless (as the headline says) in a few short days.

At the Australian, Michael Stutchbury seems personally miffed by the rogue GDP result and concludes rather snarkily:

But this won’t stop unemployment from rising, which will hit consumer spending. The record net export boost won’t be repeated. And business investment is collapsing.

Australia will be battling recession for the rest of the year.

Thankfully, the Australian also has George Megalogenis who is a notable exception to the ‘we wuz robbed’ tone of much of the media commentary:

Funny, isn’t it, how easy it is to twist good news? There is a relentless negativity in our public debate about the economy at present that defies what our own senses are telling us.

Australia remains the only developed economy with a fighting chance of avoiding a deep recession, but we don’t want to believe it.

The most plausible case from here on is for a normal recession in an abnormal world.

In other words, a soft landing in which unemployment does not race too far past 8 per cent.

In fact, many in the markets are far more positive than the doom spruikers in the media:

“Rumours of the death of the Australian economy have been highly exaggerated.

Every other major developed economy went into reverse in a big way in the first three months of the year but Australia actually grew,” Commsec economist Craig James said.

“The worst of the economic slowdown is now over.”

Advertising supremo, Harold Mitchell, who possibly has even more contact with the ‘real’ world than Ross Gittins, also tells it as he sees it (to borrow a bit from the Gittins prose flowerbed) in the Age this morning, and it’s a very different perspective:

The real news about the real world of today is that confidence in the economy is returning but we will still get some bumps along the way.

Marketing people are always more interested in the future than the past and I am with them. I never found a way to make money out of the past anyway.

Only economists worry about the past and so they should, given their recent performances.

As to the politics of it all, Peter Hartcher gets that exactly right:

For a neophyte prime minister with no experience in economic policy, this is a vital political trophy. It gives Rudd a new credibility as an economic manager. It will help entrench him as a competent leader in difficult times.