The Australian Financial Review (a Fairfax business publication) was pretty confident about the shape of things to come early last October: 

Not so much in today’s edition:

 

Which just goes to show that five months can be a long time in a declining global economy.  It also raises the question of just where newspapers — especially newspapers that one would imagine might take a sobre and prudent eye to the reporting of vulnerable economies — should draw the line in attempting to milk difficult economic circumstances for the tawdry end of lively headlines.  This is not an issue isolated to the AFR (a tabloid after all, and thus exciteable by nature) but one that the media as a whole needs to think on long and hard as the Australian economy stumbles and confidence becomes a fragile — but no less self-fulfilling — commodity.  Memo editors: people read the papers you know. They think you know what you’re doing, even if, as the evidence continues to suggest, you’re just feeling your way.