Larry Williams Drive

Well, I think it's fair to say that the GDP print has come in at something of a shock. The Reserve Bank was picking a contraction of 0.3 percent. The consensus was a contraction of 0.4 percent. The worst-case prediction from one of the banks was a contraction of 0.5 percent. It's come in at a contraction of 0.9 percent, which is basically twice as bad as most of us thought. Now, the immediate problem that we have is what this is going to do to confidence, because people are already scared. That is why it's taking this country so long to come out of recession, because every single piece of bad news like Trump's tariffs earlier this year freaks us out all over again, so we keep our wallets shut for longer. There are people out there who absolutely can afford to spend more money, but they're choosing not to because they do not know that they can trust that we're through the worst of it. This is part of the reason, if not one of the bigger reasons, why the Reserve Bank's cuts to the OCR are not stimulating the ec