HOW USEFUL THE passive mood is in print and speech. You can use to say it whatever you wish and bother little with how you know it - as, for instance, in our headline yesterday: 'Retail sales plunge worse than feared.'
Who feared? It turns out to be the usual people who will gladly in hindsight make forecasts in two decimal places when in foresight they do not venture past 'it's hard to tell, it all depends, we're cautiously optimistic'.
Let's look at the raw data with which they deal. The first chart gives you the retail sales value index over the past 10 years exactly as reported by Census and Statistics. Looks like a seismograph record in an earthquake, doesn't it? Aside from the extreme volatility of this data, you may notice that the really big plunge came in 1997 with the Asian financial crisis. In contrast, the decline in September on the right side of the chart hardly seems out of the ordinary.
Put it in context. In terms of economic developments, September was the worst month we have had in three years. The property market crumbled further, the stock market hit a three-year low, the talk was of doom and gloom and then, to really send things on the skids, we had September 11.
That year-on-year decline in retail sales for September could well have been 14.4 per cent, not just 4.4. Of course, people were going to put spending plans on hold once the pictures of those collapsing towers in New York came over the television. It is a surprise, in fact, that they still spent as much as they did.
These were not figures to be 'feared'. They were actually quite encouraging when you remember just how things looked in mid-September. If someone had said back then that retail sales for the month would fall by 4.4 per cent you would have responded: 'Is that all?'
