IT DOESN'T get better than this. Actually, it gets a lot worse. This is the calm before the storm.
With the economy, good things happen in bad times. Central bankers cut interest rates and governments hand out cash.
But this time it's different. Usually, the good things don't happen until after the bad times are well under way.
This time, because everyone - including the authorities - has been so shaken by the global financial crisis, the goodies are being distributed in advance.
The Reserve Bank has cut the official interest rate four months in a row, by a remarkable total of 3 percentage points, with most of that coming in just the two months since early October.
From a peak of 7.25 per cent, the official rate has been slashed by more than
four- tenths to 4.25 per cent - equal to the lowest it's reached in modern times.
The interest rate mountain it took more than six years to build has been bulldozed in three months.
And from next week the Rudd Government will start handing out cash payments of $2100 to pensioner couples and $1000 a child to most families.
The point is that the bad stuff hasn't really started happening yet. Apart from NSW, unemployment is yet to start
rising and only a few businesses have gone out backwards.
It's as though the authorities are helping us stock up with candles and tinned food while the hurricane is still out at sea.
There are more goodies to come next year, but the supplies are already running low. That means we can look forward to many months of bad times without all that many more good things to relieve the gloom.
Kevin Rudd would like us to think all the activity is a last-ditch attempt to prevent the economy sliding into recession.
It's more realistic to say it's an attempt to make the inevitable recession as short and shallow as possible.
We'll see how far they get. I doubt if they would be preparing so unstintingly if they didn't hold private fears it's going to get pretty bad.
And the trouble with being so magnanimous at a time when storm clouds are brewing is that this is a time when most people are of a mood to save not spend.
