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The good news is confidence in our economy is improving.\xa0

It has been a decent week: farmers confidence is up and markedly, our confidence is up a bit \u2014still overall pessimistic, but up nevertheless\u2014\xa0and last week we saw business confidence rise a bit.\xa0

Then come the newest numbers, our current account.\xa0

It\u2019s a mess. We are a mess. In essence we buy more from the world than we sell it, and given we are in the business of selling stuff, that doesn\u2019t make us a very good business.\xa0

Glass half full, the figure we got yesterday is stable as a percentage of GDP. But the percentage of GDP is hopeless, that's the worry.\xa0

This by the way is for the June quarter. In actual number terms it widened by $269 million.\xa0

It's all part of the wider picture we will get later today on the actual GDP, which we mentioned earlier has almost certainly gone backwards for the same period.\xa0

So, join the 2 bits together. You have an economy going backwards, driven in part by the fact that we buy more stuff than we sell. Think about that scenario in your own life.\xa0

You make a living selling stuff, but you still buy more things. They cost more than what you make, you are sinking. That's the story of this country.\xa0

Our net investment liability position \u2014another good comparison we can make with our own lives, note the words net liability\u2014 was $205 billion, which is 49.7 % of GDP. That is over $6 billion more than it was in the last quarter. \xa0

It\u2019s getting worse, we are more liable. You don\u2019t in life want to liable, you don\u2019t in life want a deficit. In really simple terms, in the deals that involve NZ and the world, we have more liabilities than we have assets.\xa0

As I say most of us don\u2019t run our lives that way, and yet we seem happy to watch our country being\xa0run that way.\xa0

It has become very clear this week from the Tory Whanau revelations that we have people in decision making positions\xa0who have no idea how to turn a dollar, spend a dollar, value a dollar, or run anything that resembles an economy of any sort or size. \xa0

The numbers don\u2019t lie. The numbers aren't good but they can't be a surprise given the sort of people who have been in charge.\xa0

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