The news didn’t get near the top stories of the day.
We’ve returned to the familiar soap opera of domestic squabbles and politics.
Perhaps it will hit harder when the latest spike flows through to the petrol pumps.
The panic about actually running out of petrol or diesel has also started to fade, although I’m not sure the risk has changed all that much yet.
Regardless, as the stalemate in the Strait of Hormuz drags on, the cost of living will certainly keep rising.
The risk of stagflation – the ugly combo of inflation and economic contraction – grows.
But there is no dramatic headline to crystallise that threat.
In a sense, it is shocking just how unshocking the situation has become.
After six years of turmoil since Covid arrived, it feels like we are becoming inured to living with a lousy economy.
Inured … not a word I use every day.
After I wrote it, I had to look it up to be sure I was using it correctly.
It’s a fancy way of saying hardened. We’re becoming hardened to grim economic news.
It feels like hardly anyone bats an eyelid when they hear the economy is going south again.
I’m not sure there was ever much confidence in the recovery talk before the war started, despite my best efforts to talk up green shoots.
So, is being inured a good thing or a bad thing?
It turns out it’s a word with complex psychological and moral dimensions. My favourite kind.
If you’re an athlete like a boxer or long-distance runner, you need to become inured to getting punched in the face or the pain of extreme muscle fatigue.
A surgeon needs to become inured to the gory insides of the human body.
On balance, that’s all good stuff. It’s about becoming fit for purpose.
The word pops up in the English translation of Homer’s Odyssey.
“And what if one of the gods does wreck me out on the wine-dark sea? I have a heart that is inured to suffering and I shall steel it to endure that too.”
Odysseus was a hard bastard. He’d just been through hell in the Trojan War. He doesn’t care if the gods could throw their worst at him. He can take it.
But of course, there is a risk in becoming inured to the point that we just accept our lot.
In coping with adversity, we might cease to fight against it and give up on improving our lot.
It can become a moral failing as we accept the misery around us.
A soldier who has become inured to the horrors of war is probably a good soldier, but are they still a good person?
Some societies become inured to political corruption – thankfully not this one yet.
Americans are inured to the hyperbole of the US President, something that allows him a dangerously free rein to enact ever more radical policies.
New Zealanders seem increasingly inured to disastrous weather events.
Is that strengthening our resolve to fight climate change, or are we giving up?
Perhaps most tragically, in my lifetime, New Zealanders have become inured to extreme poverty.
In our cities, we barely give a second thought to walking past forlorn, homeless people.
On an individual level, there is clearly little we can do, but our familiarity becomes acceptance and diminishes any political urgency for resolving the issue.
I’m old enough to remember how shocking and foreign homelessness was when I first visited cities like London and San Francisco.
Finding the right balance with regard to becoming inured is one of the great human dilemmas.
Meanwhile, markets have grown bored of the war, just as Pie Funds chief investment officer Mike Taylor assured me they would a month ago.
The current malaise is understandable, I guess.
We definitely can’t afford to get stuck in a funk of gloom and inaction just because the macroeconomic conditions are bad.
Businesses can’t keep waiting for some hypothetical recovery. They survived till ’25, waited for an economic fix in ’26. Good luck telling anyone it will be heaven in ’27!
Humans are pretty good at getting used to a new status quo.
But it seems worth remembering that, prior to Covid, New Zealand experienced the second-longest period of economic expansion in its history.
Between 2009 and 2020, the economy did not contract – even for a single quarter.
Only the golden years from 1952 to the late 1960s offered a longer period of economic growth.
Business people are resourceful and resilient, and they will keep on keeping on … until they can’t.
But even for the businesses that are surviving and doing okay there is an opportunity cost to this extended period of low growth and contraction.
Expansion plans are delayed, and investment in new technology goes on hold. Companies might not be cutting staff, but they are not hiring either.
We’ll see our unemployment rate stay stuck at about 5.4% when new data drops next week.
Do we have to accept that a rate above 5% is now the new normal?
Last week, data for March showed Australia’s annual inflation rate hit 4.6%. That’s before much of the oil shock had flowed through the economy.
Things are better here, but not much. Annual inflation is 3.1% and expected to go much higher in the coming months.
In the past five years, the inflation rate has only been within the Reserve Bank’s target band (1-3%) for four quarters.
The RBNZ is allowed to look through inflation based on supply shocks in the medium term. If we apply hindsight, all those medium terms are starting to add up to a very long term.
Should we just be more patient? The great economist John Maynard Keynes had a good response to that way of thinking: “In the long run we’re all dead.”
So, when does resilience simply become acceptance?
I remain hopeful that this latest economic shock will play through before the year is out. I feel like there is pent-up demand in the New Zealand economy and we could see a strong bounce if we can just get a clear runway of economic conditions.
But it’s important that we don’t drop our expectations about how a New Zealand economy should look … and still could.
Liam Dann is business editor-at-large for the New Zealand Herald. He is a senior writer and columnist, and also presents and produces videos and podcasts. He joined the Herald in 2003.
Catch up on the debates that dominated the week by signing up to our Opinion newsletter – a weekly round-up of our best commentary.