Business: markets, labour and the numbers underneath them

Business here is the arithmetic rather than the sentiment. A price is reported with the series behind it, an index with its base period, and a change with the interval it is measured over, because a percentage without a denominator is decoration. The vehicle quota premiums and resale housing figures on this site are both aggregated from the published record, so a reader can check the shape of a claim against the dataset that produced it.

The beats are the ones that touch a household: what work costs and pays, what property transacts at, what a compulsory saving scheme does with a monthly deduction, and how a market absorbs a policy change. Company news appears when it explains something structural, not because a filing was released.

The desk takes a deliberate position on forecasts: it reports them as forecasts, with whose they are and what they assumed. A projection restated as a fact is the most common way business reporting misleads without saying anything false.

Two kinds of piece sit here and they are reported differently. The historical ones (a gig-economy classification case, an interbank market seizing in 2013, a commodity slump that took years to be named) are settled enough that the argument is about what happened and why it was misread at the time. The recurring ones are read straight off the public registers: resale transactions, rental approvals, vehicle quota exercises, the national indicators. For those, the figure on the page comes from the register rather than from a report about the register, and the register is named so the number can be re-derived by anyone who disagrees with the reading of it.