Banking like it s 1892: Our recession habits had a familiar pattern theage.com.au - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theage.com.au Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
After millions of words, I never expected my life’s work to be reduced to an economic indicator. Yet that’s what it has come to, according to researchers at Australia’s central bank. And you can blame Covid-19 for this, as well.
In their quest to gain better and more timely insights into the economy, economists Kim Nguyen and Gianni La Cava of the Reserve Bank of Australia have constructed a “news sentiment index,” or NSI, from articles about the economy in major papers Down Under, Bloomberg reported this past week. They posit that news accounts not only provide a real-time indicator of the economy, but also have some “causal” role (their word, not mine) in shaping sentiment among businesses and consumers.