Sometimes the only reasonable reaction to the contradictions and complete nonsense attached to many economic headlines is to laugh - otherwise you might cry.
It's in the nature of the headline writing business that you look for the most alarming and eye-catching aspect of a story and then shine a spotlight on it. Of course that can mean a total abandonment of any sort of intellectual rigour, but hey, if you were concerned about that you wouldn't work for the tabloid press.
I have no idea who Justin Vallejo or Rhys Haynes might be, but their joint by-line was on the April 5 Daily Telegraph story that in my opinion represents the low-point of that rag's low standard of economic reporting - the front page beat-up that featured a large picture of the Reserve Bank governor and the headline "Is this the most useless man in Australia". The story did somewhat less than a good job in representing what the governor was saying about banks putting up interest rates.
It's happening again in a more general sense with the reporting of the "consumer recession", as some are labelling it. I suspect the headline writers might have been disappointed that yesterday's national accounts didn't show Australia was in recession, so some of them are trying to ignore the total economy and just concentrate on households. In old-fashioned journalistic language, it's called a "beat up".
The reality is that Australia is not having a recession. Our growth has slowed, but the unpalatable truth (for some) it that it had to - we were running at the limits of our capacity.
And where we are tightening our belts right now as a nation, well, the belts needed tightening.
Anyone else remember all those other headlines not very long ago about the mountain of debt we were building up, the worries about Australian consumers bashing their credit cards far too much, the housing affordability crisis because we were taking on mortgages that were simply too big for us?
The truth is that Australian consumers are overweight with debt. Everyone had a good time at the retail party, but now the combination of interest rates, petrol prices, wobbly housing prices and global financial uncertainty has made us collectively reconsider our spending.
That's why we've cut back. For some people sailing close to the wind, it genuinely hurts. For the nation as a whole, we'll be better off for it down the track.
Australia is blessed to be still enjoying a resources and infrastructure boom that will continue to several years. The consumer spending side of the economy has had to be curtailed to make room for it.
The end result is a richer country with less debt - still a massive amount of credit but any standard, but less than now.
That means banks' lending and profits won't grow as quickly as they used to. It means our retailers are looking at flat profits after a golden run of ever-greater spending.
But it also means our overall economic growth becomes more sustainable, with less chance of really having a recession. It means we can have more confidence about investing in solid Australian companies.
Just don't expect to read about it in the rags.