My amusement at their transparency quickly turned to exasperation.
A further perusal of the article revealed that it was based on literally nothing of substance.
The best Mr Dillian could come up with was that a government that wanted to make it more difficult for foreigners to buy existing houses and to limit the numbers entering the country would be seen as putting up the shutters – and that could then have a depressing effect on economic activity.
An obvious rejoinder is that our new Government is grappling with a deep-seated problem inherited from its predecessor – a raging asset inflation that has made decent housing unaffordable for many of our young families.
The limits placed on foreign purchasers are merely a sensible attempt to damp down the demand that is fuelling an unsustainable asset inflation, the dangers of which should surely be apparent to Mr Dillian, given his experience with Lehman Brothers.
Interestingly, while Mr Dillian professed to see a threat of recession from the new Government, other commentators hostile to a left-of-centre government have pointed up the supposedly inflationary consequences of measures like raising the minimum wage and more spending on health and education.
The two sets of right-wing commentators should try harder to get their stories straight – they can't have it both ways.
I then further noted that the Forbes magazine piece had been seized on by the National Party and circulated widely in social media – as though it was a properly researched critique of the new Government's policies. Then the penny dropped (don't ask me whether that, too, could be both recessionary and inflationary!).
It struck me that the episode tells us something important about the neo-liberal hegemony which has dominated politics in western countries for the past decade or two.
Those who defend the propensity of "free-market" policies to concentrate wealth in just a few hands will always warn that any attempt to second-guess those market forces will threaten the prosperity and living standards of ordinary people.
So, we are constantly assured that a government that tries to produce fairer outcomes must inevitably damage the economy. That message – as part of the attempt to dissuade the government from intervening in the operations of the "free market"- is delivered these days on a global scale.
To be successful, such an attempt must be co-ordinated and relentless – and the only way of doing that on the required scale is to repeat it across the international media.
The goal is not to win the argument – hence the lack of any substance in Mr Dillian's piece – but to dominate the headlines.
A headline that links "recession' and "Ardern", even if there is nothing to support it, is a victory because it helps subliminally to confirm in the public mind that there is always a price to pay for electing a left-of-centre government.
Mr Dillian's piece was not aimed primarily at a New Zealand readership, (although that did not stop New Zealand politicians and their supporters from trying to take some advantage from it).
It was aimed instead at international readers and was intended to confirm to them that a left-of-centre government in New Zealand was performing true to expectation.
In the absence of anything to support it, the Dillian hatchet-job is best seen as just another part of the widely based and ceaseless campaign to discourage voters, in whatever country, from using their power to say to the fat cats "enough is enough!"
