All the economists, and especially Westpac's cunning Rory Robertson (of, amongst other things, "I forced Steve Keen to walk from Canberra to Mt Kosciuszko" fame), were trying to lever out of Debelle valuable snippets of information on the future direction of rates, which is what they are paid to do. I loved Rory's obviously-impossible-to-answer-question, which was something along the lines of: what are you going to do about the nine basis point increase in lending rates, mate (knowing full-well that Debelle would swot his buddy back)? The AFR reports this one, when Debelle was asked why so many economists and traders got the February decision wrong (present company excluded!). It forced me to laugh out loud:
“When you give them [market economists] two months to think about things, that’s always dangerous”
Interestingly, and I think encouragingly, Debelle had the creativity to link to an excellent blog in his speech, and then proceeded to quote from it. More of this freedom would be a good thing. I know from my own web statistics that the public service is an avid reader of blogs--my number one audience is Treasury followed by the RBA.
Finally, the AFR's Rear Window column added this cool cartoon, which I have inserted below (and will remove if the AFR has any issue with the link!). Since I seem to be on good terms with the new leadership, I am hoping there will not be any dramas ;-)
