How much is a great article worth? About US$1bn, if the subject of the piece happens to be Prime Minister John Key, the publication is the Wall Street Journal, and you just happen to be the ANZ National, according to ubiquitous economics savant Bernard Hickey.

Hickey’s latest online dispatch looks at ANZ National’s recent success in raising US$1 billion through an issue of government-guaranteed three-year bonds to US investors.

The piece toasts the deal because, as Hickey correctly points out, the longer it had been taking for banks to refinance on terms of three years or more, the greater the vulnerability of New Zealand’s banking system.

Unfortunately, the global economic environment generally and S&P’s recent credit downgrade of the country specifically, have made this something of a hard slog for local financial institutions.

But then “something either lucky or very well orchestrated happened,” Hickey marvels. “Prime Minister John Key gave an interview on the 9th floor of the Beehive to Mary Kissel, the editorial page editor of the Wall St Journal Asia.”

The terrific interview, in which Key admittedly took rather a different approach to dealing with the recession than he had in his comments up until then to the New Zealand media, not only gave the premier a zappy notice in his own right, but also unstuck the pockets of international moneymen when ANZ National CEO Graham Hodges went to the United States for a roadshow to promote this US$1 billion bond issue:

“Time and again, Hodges says, investors told him Key’s interview in the Wall St Journal had reassured them, despite the uncertainty of a potential credit rating downgrade. Sometimes it’s a struggle to get foreign investors to look past the shorthand of credit ratings and the headlines of research notes. Key’s interview made them sit up and take notice.”

Hmm. It might also have been, of course, that the interview ultimately had little to do with it, and Hodges has simply wheeled it out as a pleasant diversion from the more pressing matter of where long-term interest rates have been heading since the deal was concluded. (Alternatively, if a one-off interview really did stitch up the deal, what does that say about the lessons in hype that banking institutions haven't learned since last September?)

The fact that Hickey appears to have uncritically swallowed this line suggests that he isn’t quite as sharp a commentator when it comes to media-related subjects as he tends to be on sheerly economic issues.

[Hat tip: Kiwiblog.]