Gide, humans. It's a good time to be alive right now. There's no more rain in Sydney and

New South Wales, not the rain we've had. We had horrendous floods over the southern summer and

interminable, interminable rain. My roof is getting fixed, couldn't handle it, leaks everywhere.

And it's just nice to have some cold,

crisp, dry winter weather heading down in the snow this weekend. Then in a couple of weeks,

I'm going to Europe on a holiday. Things are good. I hope things are good for you. Because things are bad in the world. And it's a moment to remember the difference between the macro and the micro.

There's a grim prognosis for the global economy that came out this week from the World Bank.

They say that the grinding war in Ukraine, added to supply chain chokeholds, added to COVID lockdowns in China,

added to inflation in energy and food prices,

all mean that we're approaching an almost inevitable recession, a global recession.

When you have a recession combined with inflation, we haven't had that since the 1970s.

It was awful.

Stagflation, they call it. It's very hard to deal with, very

hard to get out of. At the same time, Europe's dealing with one of the biggest waves of refugees

since World War II. Nearly seven million Ukrainians, mainly women and children, have streamed

across the border to escape that horrendous violence. What do central banks do about

inflation without also ruining the economy? This week in Australia, the reserve bank surprised

everybody by implementing the largest possible interest rate rise. People had thought that it might

be a quarter of a percent. Some people thought it could be 0.4 of a percent, which would have been huge. They went with a full half a percent. So what's

that going to do to the property market, which is already declining? What's that going to do to the

economy and to business? I guess they're just prioritizing, getting inflation under control

over everything else.

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