That's Australian economist Bill Mitchell's lead-off line in his post "The Ireland growth miracle is largely illusory and biasing Eurozone growth data upwards".
I don't know enough to discern the nebulousity of The Celtic Tiger's GDP growth but am thinking of adding the Mitchellism to our Great First Lines collection.
Who can forget 2016's:
"A former meerkat expert at London Zoo was cleared Tuesday of
assaulting a monkey handler in a love spat over a llama-keeper."
Now with added Meerkats that look like Nigel Farage.
And back to finance:
"I am on the train from Geneva to Zurich, bound for the annual
forecasting dinner of the Swiss Chartered Financial Analyst society...."
—Great First Lines: Econo-luxury Edition
Still debating, nine years after the fact, whether this goes in the collection:
His ex-wife’s personality was like chocolate – not the smoky, tangy, exquisitely rich and
full-bodied type, but the over-sweet, tooth-cracking, factory-processed, made-with-
vegetable-oil kind that leaves one with diabetes and an aneurysm the size of a grape.
— Shalom Chung, Hong Kong
Granted it's not
"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."But Orwell's dead, and it's not 1984, but they share that off-putting sense of something not being quite right here,
