Today, it was announced that inflation fell from 7.2% to 6.7% due to a "steep and sudden drop in imported inflation". Now take a look at the bias in the mainstream media. The Herald are presently screaming a headline:
Inflation Falls Big Time: Economists Way off in Forecasts.
Meanwhile Newshub's reporting of the same latest inflation figures is the opposite:
Sky-High CPI: NZ's Inflation Barely Slows to 6.7 per cent: Still Fastest Pace since the 1990s
Next time the Herald insults "economists" as being "way off", maybe the paper could have the decency to report the truth since "economists" like me have been doing untold radio interviews arguing that since international price pressures were falling, the OCR needn't have been increased so much. The "economists" to which the Herald are referring are a little group of mainly private bank "economists", not a sample of the profession.
The big story today should have been that the latest inflation figures support the argument we have long been making - namely that price pressures have been coming off due to overseas factors so there was never a need to "engineer a recession" in NZ. A soft landing, not a hard one, should have been this nation's goal. But the damage is done - tens of thousands of Kiwis now have their backs against the wall due to their high mortgage costs.
The Herald's economics correspondent is the one who is "way off" in his characterization of this story, since he has been defending and supporting the RBNZ every inch of the way.
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