Australia

Hmm... the primary cause of recessions is a collapse of public sentiment.

Like 3 weeks ago if everyone thought "oh wow this is really terrible we better hunker down and not go away for easter", you basically have an immediate recession.

Sometimes a recession is really necessary - like if this crisis lasts for a year or more then yeah, our economy will probably need to shrink in order to adapt as you say.

On the other hand if reason can prevail for a minute and things settle down with Iran, or even if we can get a good arrangement with the countries receiving our LNG to keep us topped up with Diesel, then we might be able to sail through this.

This post claims that we have more fuel now than we've ever had. At this moment the whole fiasco is a problem of public sentiment.

Cutting the excise and telling everyone to go away for Easter was a way to soothe public sentiment. Everyone just cool down, keep doing what you're doing, and we'll adapt as necessary as the situation unfolds.

I guess I'm saying that for the moment, we do want people to pretend the problem doesn't exist because in a way the problem has been misunderstood.