KEY POINTS:
Every time you pick up the paper or turn on the radio it is like a klaxon blaring "Arrrrhuggga!" Brace yourself and assume the crash position. We are diving into a global recession that appears almost bottomless.
As much as you tell yourself, "Stay deadly calm", every nerve in your body is emitting a High C.
It is as though the economies of every nation have linked arms and jumped together off a high cliff. Actually, thanks to globalisation, that is almost exactly what has happened.
Fine, the problem is global, but all you can see is your own pathetically small personal savings eroding even further and the value of your home deflating like a pricked balloon.
For first-home buyers, while properties are becoming more affordable, those nice people at the bank want bigger deposits that you can't reach because they pay such piddling interest on the few dollars you manage to accumulate every week.
The chances are if you have a mortgage it's locked in a fixed interest rate and it will be months or even years before you can take advantage of lower interest rates because your bank will charge you a sum roughly equivalent to the debt of Guatemala if you attempt to break the contract.
Don't bother thinking about building or renovating - you are definitely not in the mood to borrow more money, even if the interest rates hit 0 per cent.
Forget all hope of a decent pay rise or bigger profit because you are now seriously beginning to wonder if you will even have a job or a business left to run this time next year.
As the disaster is worldwide, it is probably a little unfair to blame our Government for not quickly putting it right, but blame it we will if we don't start seeing some action soon.
Yes, this coming week John Key will make a speech outlining special assistance measures for small and medium business. Woo-hoo.
The employment summit is being held at the end of the month at which the country's best and brightest business brains may come up with some ideas. Whoopee.
Where's the action?
Where is that huge "fiscal stimulus package" that Bill English keeps blathering on about, and why aren't we beginning to feel some effect?
Well, governments and bureaucracies tend to move at roughly the same pace as continents drift around the planet.
Take the massive infrastructural programme that is supposed to boost the economy.
You cannot, for example, build a second Auckland harbour crossing overnight. Indeed, you can't even start digging the tunnel until great telephone book-sized reports have been commissioned, studied, redrafted, debated in public and put out to tender.
Even when all that is done, the chances are it will be a cock-up. The tunnel will be too small, head in the wrong direction or lack sufficient feeder roads and you will still be crawling along bumper-to-bumper
while being overtaken by spotty teenagers on skateboards.
I am not being too cynical. Auckland's Waterview connection had the green light but on Friday Transport Minister Stephen Joyce sent it back to the drawing board, calling for a report on its cost efficiency and "future proofing". That should delay it another few years. Actually, sometimes it does pay to think about a project.
Over Auckland's Anniversary Weekend I went north and came back on the Monday on the new Puhoi to Orewa motorway extension.
I think this marvellous piece of engineering had first been envisaged when I was at school, Muldoon was prime minister, there was a Ministry of Works and we were all still marvelling at that new decimal currency thing.
Despite decades of planning and laborious years of construction, the new motorway has one small flaw that was immediately obvious to anyone driving north on the day it opened.
Did I say "driving north"? I mean sitting, facing north, stationary in a long queue. The northbound tunnel at the Puhoi end of the motorway, like the southbound tunnel, is wide enough to take two lanes of traffic.
Unlike the southbound tunnel which does have two lanes, the northbound only has one.
Why? Well, it seems there isn't enough room at the end of the tunnel to allow two lanes of traffic to merge with the old State Highway 1.
So they simply chopped the thing down to one lane, neatly moving the holiday traffic bottleneck from Orewa a whole 7.5km north to Puhoi at a cost of $385 million.
Still, I guess the theory behind big infrastructure projects these days is that they don't have to actually work, they simply need to pump the money into the economy.
The Government had better start priming that pump quickly before we all lose patience and start blaming it for our globally driven woes.
