Is this the so-called rock-star economy? Or the rocky road to recession? It is not raining on John Key and his colleagues. It is pouring.
Still smarting at the mass defection of supporters the party took for granted in the Northland by-election, National is exhibiting the self-absorbed demeanour of someone who cannot work out what is happening to them and is not sure what to do about it.
Not that National can do much to halt the rise in the currency or stimulate the international milk market.
In the past week the prime minister and his finance minister have also appeared to accept they will not meet their long-established target this year to resume Budget surpluses.
As for Auckland house prices, the warning from the Reserve Bank on Wednesday of a potential downward, disruptive correction in prices could not have been more blunt.
The bank's worry is that the trading banks, which have 60% of their lending in residential mortgages, could find themselves in dire straits such that credit dries up and the economy goes into a severe downturn.
Mr Key's response was ''crisis, what crisis?'', but that scenario ought to chill Mr Key and Bill English to the bone.
But the Reserve Bank has not stopped there.
It is strongly urging the Government to give ''fresh consideration'' to ways of shutting property speculators attracted by untaxed capital gains out of the Auckland market.
Mr Key has long ruled out a capital gains tax.
His one consolation is that Labour leader Andrew Little has effectively done likewise.
But Mr Little is not in Government.
Mr Key is.
The latter's political pragmatism, which sees him take the path of least resistance, has finally caught him out.
In failing to institute some kind of tax or other disincentive to curb speculative sales, Mr Key now has to take tougher and less popular action to force a correction, but not one which sends prices through the floor.
The alternative is to leave intervention to the Reserve Bank.
The bank argues its tools would have only a limited impact.
The onus is on Messrs Key and English.
While Mr Key is employing the ''no crisis'' line, it is a safe bet midnight oil is being burned to tackle what is now the No 1 issue confronting the Government.
The laws of economics dictate a correction will happen. House prices must stop rising at some point.
The danger is that those who have bought at the market high will think values may tumble, panic, and put their houses back on the market to cut their losses.
The result will be the opposite of what they intended.
There will be a glut of houses on the market as sellers who bought in at lower price levels likewise try to offload their properties while they still retain their value.
Demand will dry up.
Would-be buyers will either opt out of the market for fear of it collapsing or wait until prices stop falling.
Those who stay put in their homes will suffer a drop in wealth.
Hindsight will be in abundance, but National will get all the blame.
Suddenly, National is finding the business of governing far more vexed.
That is not saying that the Key Administration has reached some kind of tipping point from whence it irreversibly slides to defeat in 2017.
There have been other (brief) periods when National has endured a bumpy ride during its six-plus years in power, only to regain its poise.
But the political atmosphere has changed.
Labour's recovery under Mr Little has shifted the spotlight back where it should be - illuminating the actions of a government that has an increasing tendency to cut constitutional corners, be loose with the facts and rewrite history when it suits.
Some ministers are handling this scrutiny better than others.
Sticking a microphone in front of Gerry Brownlee these days is to invite a salvo of sarcasm from the Defence Minister to any persistent line of questioning, especially relating to New Zealand's Iraq deployment.
Mr Key on the other hand seems to spend half of every day stuck behind microphones as he seeks to both soothe voters and smooth over the cracks opened up by the likes of Mr Brownlee.
Some senior ministers are alert to the need to provide background information to the media explaining why the Government has undertaken some course of action on something.
But the notion there is some huge spin machine which relentlessly force feeds journalists with National's take on events is a myth.
That did not matter during National's first two terms.
It sure matters now.
And never more so than when Mr Key is overseas and cannot micro-manage every domestic issue.
The third-term blues are also prompting the prime minister to dig into his reserves of political capital.
That was the case on Monday as he suddenly downplayed National's surplus target as being an ''artificial'' one rather than a real one, saying achieving it was like ''landing a 747 on a pinhead''.
There would be more sympathy for Mr Key's shifting of the goalposts had he and Mr English not milked in advance what looked like being one of National's major success stories.
The search for the lost surplus has been National's Holy Grail.
It has also become a measure of whether National can lay claim to being a better manager of the economy than Labour.
The final size of what Messrs English and Key say will be a deficit will not be known until October.
They will have seen the Treasury's finalised Budget forecasts. Presumably they are not crash hot for this year.
The last thing National wants is for Budget Day next month to be overshadowed by having failed to make surplus.
Moreover, a large(ish) deficit will affect the credibility and scale of National's plan to cut taxes ahead of the 2017 election.
• John Armstrong is The New Zealand Herald political correspondent.
