Just in relation to interest rates being where they are, there was an excellent editorial recently in The Australian newspaper.
It made the point that the sightings of Wayne Swan's inflation genie have been few and far between.
And it said until the economic crisis began to bite in the second half of the year, that supernatural creature the inflation genie was one of the most overworked metaphors in Australian politics.
Shorthand for rising food and petrol prices, which the Treasurer blamed on the previous Government's profligacy.
As it said, now, like the Grocery Choice and Fuel Watch websites that were supposed to tame it, the genie slipped quietly from the Treasurer's rhetoric.
"It's reasonable to ask if the Government's consuming focus on inflation and the Reserve Bank's efforts to fight it by raising interest rates may have taken attention away from the gathering international financial crisis and its recessionary impact on Australia.”
The Australian alludes to its own editorial back in March, "If the risk of recession is raised because the Government has talked up inflationary expectations for political gain while the RBA has aggressively tightened monetary policy against a backdrop of the US financial market meltdown, Kevin Rudd will not get away with blaming John Howard for the problem".
Now that of course is shorthand for saying, did the raising of interest rates earlier in the year for simply political, not economic, purposes, did the raising of interest rates make our problems today worse than they need be.
"It will be seen as an own goal by an inexperienced Treasurer, a gung-ho RBA Governor and a Prime Minister who showed so little interest in the economy that he went missing overseas at the crucial phase of forming Labor's first budget.
"With hindsight it's clear the brakes were being hit too hard," as I might add on this programme we were saying trenchantly at the time.
The editorial gives credit to Malcolm Turnbull, who made the point at the National Press Club at the end of last month that the economic storm clouds were visible at the end of last year.
Governments and central banks around the world were loosening monetary and fiscal policy as Australia was tightening.
There were further issues raised in the editorial which sum up some of the points that we've been making on this programme.
Mr Swan boasted about the budget that he brought down in May being carefully designed to fight inflation.
But as the editorial says, Mr Swan's neutral budget failed to anticipate the magnitude of the gathering crisis.
The Australian had urged him to prepare for falling revenue from the mining sector by trimming middle class welfare to reduce recurrent expenditure.
It would have been a prudent move.
It further says, "With the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September the irrelevance of the war on inflation became apparent.
“The Government's decision to put an unlimited guarantee on deposits in banks, building societies and credit unions was decisive, but its consequences were dire.
"It created a run on unguaranteed mortgage funds and cash management trusts that has been stemmed, but not solved, by freezing accounts".
I might point out those accounts are still frozen today.
Malcolm Turnbull said at the National Press Club at the end of last month that Mr Rudd was the only national leader whose policies had made the situation worse.
The editorial said, "Since assuming leadership of the party, Mr Turnbull has shown himself to be a prescient critic of the Government, who's been ahead of the game on economic matters such as the retail deposit guarantee and the wholesale funding guarantee".
Even at the end of last month Wayne Swan was announcing "We don't believe it's necessary in the current circumstances to borrow to invest in the strength of the Australian economy.
"If the budget's forced into deficit, Mr Swan will be hoist on his own petard".
All of which suggests, with a further reduction in interest rates yesterday, that the Government's management of the economy has been all over the place.
The worst feature of it though is the extent to which we've talked down the Australian economy, at a time when 95 per cent of Australians have jobs, interest rates are the lowest they've been in seven years and the banks are stable.
Mr Rudd should be telling the nation to get on with the business of doing business.
If you work hard enough you'll win.
Why we have a preference for doom and gloom, I've got no idea.
