KEY POINTS:
By now, the stresses of Christmas should be easing up. We will have disposed of the wrapping paper - thoughtfully, please, in the recycle bin - and those of us who hadn't already headed to the beach or bush, may have checked out the Boxing Day sales, in search of a bargain or two.
If you bought stuff you really need with money you actually have, you will have played your part in a virtuous circle of demand and supply and contributed to the collective duty we all share: spending our way out of the mess we find ourselves in.
The fact that "meltdown" - a technical term that became chillingly familiar in the age of nuclear-reactor accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl - re-entered the everyday vocabulary this year makes us all pause for thought. The arguments between the two main parties about the relative sizes of their promised tax cuts now seem rather trivial, in the face of forecasts of job losses in the hundreds of thousands and a tanking domestic and international economy.
In times like these - in all times, actually - prudence is a proper course of action, not least because financial imprudence on the individual and corporate levels is a good part of the reason that we are in the fix we are in.
During the past decade, we spent too much, and we were spending money we didn't have. Mesmerised by the spiralling values of the houses we lived in, we felt - and acted - much richer than we were. Too many of us sank too much of our investment capital into residential property, further boosting house prices and, not incidentally, slamming the door on the dream of home ownership for the members of the next generation or two. The finance-company sector which now lies largely in ruins with billions in retirement savings buried beneath the rubble, also lived beyond its means.
But if caution is called for, anxiety is not. Like the greed that drove too many of us in the last decade, anxiety feeds on itself and creates exaggerated expectations. Like it or not, we live in economies - local, national and international - and not in subsistence settlements. Much though we would like to shut the door and hide under the bed until the storm blows over, we cannot.
We also should not. It remains the case that the smartest course of action is to clear personal debt and not sign up for more. Beyond that, the wisest course was, and remains, to clear debt. But it is also true that spending has become something of a social duty.
It's hard for people to spend when they are anxious about whether their job will disappear next week. But there is a fine balance to be struck here: if we do not spend, we risk sowing the seeds of even greater economic misfortune. When business activity slows, employers have to cut staff; employees, seeing job cuts all around, spend less, and the whole vicious circle continues. A recession, remember, is the contraction of an economy, and an economy is made up of production and consumption. We have learned to be suspicious of consumption, but it is only bad when it is driven by credit. A recession is a time to spend money: if nothing else, those tradespeople who never returned your phone calls in the good times will be calling straight back now.
The bright side of this whole sorry mess is that, here at the end of the world, we may hope to be insulated from some of the worst of the economic storm that is gathering force.
Our exporters are likely to take a substantial hit, but less than those in economies that produce poor-quality goods. And we can be thankful that we live in a country where the quality of what is produced is high. Buying New Zealand-made always made sense, but because it will be putting food on the table of people next door, it makes more sense now.
The same logic applies to the holiday season in which you are reading this. In more buoyant times we might have tended to reach for the credit card and the passport when planning a summer holiday.
If staying close to home is now a necessity, we can make a virtue of it. The old maxim "don't leave home until you've seen the country" is now a statement of patriotic duty. We live in the best place in the world to have a holiday. Get into it. And drive safely. Have a happy new year.
