I am travelling a lot today and so this is just a brief reflection on the response in the media to yesterday’s National Account release from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The reaction from the mainstream media has been rather incredulous with most commentators claiming in the most lurid terms that the figures mean that the Reserve Bank of Australia will have no choice but to hike interest rates again at its next meeting to, as one character put it “to close the gap between supply and demand”. Well it should come as no surprise that in my assessment, the data that came out yesterday provides no basis for an interest rate increase. And given the dynamics that the data is depicting, there is no way an interest rate increase would do anything to close such a gap without plunging the economy into a major recession. Any strength in current expenditure is going outside the domestic production system via imports – capital for data centres, EVs. Capacity utilisation rates remain below 80 per cent. Unemployment is rising. Any price pressures are coming from global events that are insensitive to domestic interest rate rises.