I don't think many of us are surprised to hear that we’re back in a technical recession for the second time in a year, it's pretty rough out there.

Personally, I know people involved in retail. They're behind on rent, they can’t pay it because they aren’t making enough money any more.

I know an architecture business that hasn't had any business for months now, I've heard of contractors like draftsmen, builders, and so on cold calling other businesses looking for work.

I’ve heard of a person selling their house because they can’t afford the mortgage payments unless they take on a third job. And the bummer is, they might sell their house for less than they paid for it.

So if you're hearing that kind of thing, or if you are experiencing it yourself - it is not news to you that we’re in a recession.

And actually, the number out today actually doesn’t do it justice, cause it says the economy's shrunk by 0.1 percent- which is really not a lot.

The truth is, that number isn’t telling the full story. Because that number has been pumped up by record levels of immigration.

The real number is the GDP per capita, this is the economic number when you count every single person in the country. And that's come back by 0.7 percent in the last three months.

And here's a real brutal number- since September 2022, which means just slightly over a year's worth of data on a per capita basis, the economy has shrunk 4 percent.

That is massive, and that is what you’re feeling.

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That is the price of our Covid response, it's the price of the lockdowns and the spending and printing of the money and the resulting interest rate hikes to settle it back down again.

I was thinking yesterday about Grant Robertson's legacy and how most commentators are quite rightly saying it’ll be years before we really can say what his legacy is.

But I think the clue is in the numbers today.

What happens to us all over time is that we forget detail. We forget what is said, we forget what is done, but the thing that we are left with is how it made us feel.

So, how is this recession making you feel?

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