Phil Lowe hagiography doesn’t change his screw up

Advertisement

One can always rely on the AFR to save the reputation of an oligarch. Within its mythos, those that handle money on a grand scale are Nietzschean ubermen, a preposterous notion that trashes accountability in our political economy. Chief Loon of the Reserve Bank of Australia, Phil Lowe, gets the airbrushing today from Pamela Williams:

Asked what he means by “a place we don’t want to be” – a nation looking down the barrel of tougher circumstances, or the RBA dealing with negative interest rate decisions – he replies: “More the latter – but it is not just negative interest rates. The other possibility is money creation by the RBA, with us buying assets from the private sector.”

Ian Saines has known Lowe since the 1980s and they share a friendship close enough for Saines to check with Lowe before speaking to this magazine. Chief executive of funds management at Challenger…“Phil won’t be shy about using his position in a much more robust way than his predecessors, to implement the objectives of the bank,” Saines says. “He is into plain speaking and I think he is breaking new ground on the role of the central bank. He is signalling what are the interests and purposes of the bank.”

The full text of this article is available to MacroBusiness subscribers

$1 for your first month, then:
Cancel at any time through our billing provider, Stripe
About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.