Fireside chat Fireside Chat at the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI) Business Leaders’ Series

Well, thanks. Thanks very much, Lyle. And welcome to Andrew Hauser for a fireside chat. In a few moments we’ll be opening it up for discussion and going around the room and I’m sure there’s plenty of questions and issues that people will want to raise with you. Andrew, before we do that, I should say, of course, this room, this venue, has a very close association with the Reserve Bank. For those who don’t know, this is the room in which the Reserve Bank Governor gives her press conferences after the Reserve Bank board meeting. So a fortnight ago, the Governor was standing here explaining the decision to raise the official cash rate target. So it’s done in this room. Your office is just upstairs. So you didn’t have to come far, but I think it’s a significant association. Look to get the ball rolling Andrew, I guess we’ve seen that recent Statement on Monetary Policy. There’s been a lot of awareness, I think, about the decision that was taken. We saw the Governor then also last week appearing before the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics. So again, the perspective of the Reserve Bank has been well out there in the public domain. But I guess maybe if you can just recap for us a bit of the general context about how you see economic conditions, the outlook for inflation, monetary policy at this point in time.

Well, look, thank you very much all of you for the invite. When I arrived in Australia two years ago, I made it a priority for myself to get out and about and meet with Australian businesses directly. I actually expected people would say to me very early on, who the hell are you coming here to set interest rates for another country? What do you know about us? And I considered it a priority to get to know the country, its history, but also importantly its economy. It’s also great fun. I should say that that’s a secondary objective. So I went to Townsville, my first visit. I saw the university there, the port, the solar powered zinc smelter that is up there. I went to Gladstone to see the liquid natural gas function, the aluminium smelter. I went to Brisbane to see the tourism industry. I went to West Sydney and saw the university construction sector. These fantastic, automated distribution centres. A number of retail companies have out there, the very latest technology. I went to Melbourne, I saw the super funds. I saw shopping centres and pharmacists. I went to Hobart, saw more zinc. I went to Adelaide and saw companies involved in beer, kangaroo meat, that was a highlight, and chocolate. I went to Perth and saw the mining industry and I went to the Pilbara on a special Visit which was outstanding, to see the iron ore business close up, including some very scary small plane flights. I went to Shanghai as well and the last time I checked that obviously isn’t part of Australia, but saw the Australian Chamber of Commerce out there and the exporters and was really struck by their energy and drive. So look, what I came away from all of that with was an incredible sense of the vibrancy, the diversity, the potential of the Australian economy. It’s not just dig it and ship it, it’s much broader than that. I also heard, as someone said earlier, the challenges and the business pressures that I know you’re dealing with and I’m sure we’ll deal with today. But thank you for all the work that you do to drive this economy.

Consistent with that many aspects of the Australian economy are actually doing pretty well. You wouldn’t get that necessarily from listening to the press. Private sector growth recovered last year quite strongly. The labour market’s been strong. Unemployment is close to historic lows. The employment ratio to a population is at a record high. There’s 1.7 million new jobs since COVID. Exports have held up unexpectedly, it might be said, on the back of a much stronger world economy than all of us feared would happen as a result of the tariffs. And Australia remains one of the wealthiest countries in the world. I often say coming from the UK, it is immediately evident that the average standard of living, whether in the richest or the less rich parts of Australia, it strikes you. The challenge we are dealing with, as you say Andrew, at the moment is inflation. I regret to say that because obviously we’ve just come out of a big inflation challenge, having been close to the middle of our target range, 2 to 3 per cent. Underlying inflation is now up around three and a half. As is headline. That’s too high. And the billion-dollar question is why has that happened? There’s a benign story that it’s a series of one off factors, it should unwind. Certainly some of it, our team perhaps think even the majority. But the less benign story is that some of it reflects growing underlying pressure of that pickup in demand against supply constraints in the economy. And if that’s true, the risk is higher inflation may persist and we can’t let that happen. Inflation at this level is too high and we all remember the costs that excessively high inflation poses. We heard about it in its reduction to households, to businesses, to everyone, right across the public and the private sector. And that’s why we acted last week to raise the cash rate by 25 basis points and why I want to say we will continue to do whatever is necessary to ensure that inflation does return to that target band. So, over to you, Andrew.

Thanks, Andrew. So maybe we talk about the elephant in the room and that’s not the little party leadership for the moment. We’ll leave that to the politicians in Canberra. But no, look, I guess last year, I think it was in November last year, you gave an interesting speech and you were making the analogy of the Australian economy being a bit like a thoroughbred racehorse, possibly sort of trapped on the rails, trying to find a way to surge forward, but ultimately boxed in. And I guess that is a big issue that many in business are grappling with. And I think the practical implication which you highlighted in your speech then, was that, effectively, at the moment, we’re operating with a kind of speed limit, a capacity speed limit of around 2 per cent. If growth gets much above that level, then we start to see inflationary pressures emerge. So surely a big part of addressing that constraint is the supply side and productivity. And there’s been a lot of discussion about how we get productivity going, whether that’s through stronger business investment, capital deepening, whether it’s labour and skills, whether it’s technology, AI, regulation, less red tape. I guess I just wanted to draw on your perspectives as a central banker. Do you see from your research, are there particular areas that you would emphasise out of those or others that really would help us to address those capacity constraints in the economy?

Well, we’re not the experts on productivity. You are. The length of that question and the sophistication of that question shows that you’ve probably got more ideas about it than me. But the famous economist Paul Krugman said that productivity isn’t everything, but it’s almost everything. And I would say that my reflection, and it’s not our policy, it’s not our issue, is that really of all the issues facing the economy over the medium term, raising the sustainable growth rate is the biggest issue. Now, the good news is Australia is not alone. Maybe it’s bad news. US obviously appears to have strong productivity growth. When I think about my own country in the UK, productivity growth has also been very weak. If I think about Germany, if I think even about many of the countries in Asia, we are all seeking that next source or that wave of growth. The good news is that Australia has done incredibly well over the years at marshalling its resources, which are truly impressive, whether it’s the stuff below the ground, the human capital, the institutional strength, the geographical position, the business smarts, of people in this room to harness the challenges that the world economy and the domestic economy pose. The challenge is, as I think you’re saying, that it will take action, if I may say so, and you said this might evince a groan for the room, but since when you said, or someone said, who loves the RBA? And there was a kind of one cheer. I’ll say it anyway. It’s a job of government, but it’s also a job of industry. And I know industry knows that. Investment growth, in fact, in Australia has been quite weak in recent times. And I suspect you and others in the room will tell me there are good reasons for that. And some of those relate to policy and so on and so forth. But it is a partnership issue.

And as I say, one of the great things I brought back from this, someone called it a royal tour around Australia, which I shouldn’t, which it certainly wasn’t. But this, this tour around Australia’s business highlights is that there is innovation everywhere you look, there is business nous everywhere you look. And it is a question of harnessing that. People have done a lot of research, haven’t they, on what the sources of productivity slowdowns in Australia and elsewhere might have been, whether it’s competition. You actually gave a better list than I can give, frankly. You mentioned skills, you mentioned competition, you mentioned capital deepening, you mentioned red tape in all these various forms. I think it was one of those questions. I’m not quite sure if I can add anything to that list, but it is a priority. One final point, I don’t want this to sound like a cop out, but we have to take productivity as a given. And sometimes I think it’s thought, well, look, can you do something about it? Could you run easier policy for a while, please, mate, while we work out how to sort productivity out? We cannot do that. We have to respect the speed limit of the economy for exactly the reason you described, that if we try and run the economy hotter than it can run it, inflation will pick up. And that’s certainly, you and I know the number one issue that harms productivity growth is uncertainty about inflation, and that’s our contribution to the productivity game. I’m afraid it’s not as rich an answer as you would like, but I do agree with you and thoroughly underscore its importance. I take comfort from the fact that the government also lists it in its top three priorities this year. And I think, I think. You were at the roundtable, weren’t you?

I was, yeah.

I think the roundtable was a great start at recognising the challenge, being brutally honest about the challenge the country faces. The next step is obviously solutions, and I know people are working at that.

Okay, so we’re going to open it up to the floor. So I’m sure there’s plenty of questions out there. I’m just looking around to see who’s going to be the first cab off the rank.

Thank you. The housing industry, of course, we love a conversation about inflation and interest rates. And I’d be curious first up just to understand. Housing, of course, is one of the major economic challenges we have at the moment. Higher interest rates are going to lead to a slowdown in building activity. Housing, of course, major contributor to inflation. Fewer homes, more housing inflation. That perpetual cycle there around higher rates and higher house prices is something that I’d be interested in, how much that plays into consideration in future interest rates. Recognising, of course, we’re not all of the economy, but we are one of those major productivity constraints now. But secondly, on the topic of macroprudential restrictions, whilst interest rates are the most urgent factor we have, macroprudential restrictions are probably the most important we have. And late last year we saw APRA wander into the topic of using macroprudential restrictions to force investors out of the established housing market, which looks a little like macroprudential restrictions, moving away from the goal of system security into what would be more political objectives. So my question would be, at what point do you think, given that we have extraordinarily low mortgage default rates, rates that are approaching zero, at what point is it appropriate to start winding back some of the last 15 years’ worth of macroprudential restrictions?

You guys are good at long questions, aren’t you? The good thing is I can pick and choose what I answer. And I think look on your first thing about house prices, right? I mean, the Turkish Prime Minister, you may know, has a Turkish view of economics, which is that higher interest rates raises inflation and therefore lower interest rates will lower inflation. I was brought up using models and economic analysis that suggested that actually it’s lower interest rates that drive higher prices. And in fact, that is what we have seen over the course, as you know, of 2025. And that’s part of the transmission mechanism. It is an important part of the transmission mechanism. So if house prices didn’t respond, that would be a problem. But in the long run, real house prices reflect the balance between the demand and supply for housing. They are indifferent to, there’s lots of evidence of this, to the level of interest rates in the medium to long term. And so the challenge in the housing market, as I think you know and I’m sure you support, is how to boost housing supply. Actually I think this is an interesting fact and maybe I’ve got it off you, I don’t know. Australia is actually quite good at building houses per capita of population. It’s sort of up there amongst other countries. The problem is it needs to build a lot of houses and the supply elasticity of housing is quite low. I’m quite interested in some of the technologies that could be used to improve the speed and pace of construction. I know you’ve done some work on this as well. There’s a great company out in Western Australia that’s built this robotic house builder that can put a house up in a few hours. Unfortunately their stock price which was quite high, has roughly gone to zero because they haven’t been able to get that product off the ground. But there’s real innovation out there in that sector. And I think with due respect to your comment, the perverse impact of monetary policy, I gently push back on that you suggest we fully support though the challenges of dealing with supply.

On macroprudential I’m sorry, I’m going to push back on both your questions. I disagree. What I think APRA have done is that they have put apologies for the pompous language, an out of the money option in the market, which is to say we’re going to tell you now that if credit grows to a certain level that constraints may bite. Now someone in the press somewhere, maybe someone from the AFR here said it was like an eight-foot man walking into a pub and I can’t remember the punchline, to be honest, saying no. Oh, the punchline was no 8 foot men in the pub, please. Of course there are no such things, so it’s irrelevant. It’s not quite right. Because what it says to the banks is go ahead and lend now, it’s absolutely fine. But be aware we’ve made a judgment that at some level of credit growth, and there’s history of this in Australia, as you know, as there is in other countries, credit growth could get to a level where it in fact becomes unsustainable and threatens stability, including the housing market rather than supports it. Now, I’m not an expert in the overall set of macroprudential settings in Australia. I’m sure you’ll school me later on that. But I actually think this particular thing is quite a good example of smart design where it allows credit growth to continue. And let’s be honest, credit growth has been pretty strong over the past year. It’s been part of the stuff, I would say that policymakers may have missed slightly in terms of the strength of bank lending, predominantly to businesses, to a lesser extent into the housing sector. And so while I am not going to defend every element of a regulatory regime I don’t understand, that particular initiative, I think actually is an example of taking into account the kind of challenge you make whilst also allowing banks to lend whilst also taking seriously their need to maintain stability. I don’t suppose if you said who loves RBA in the room and no one cheered who loves APRA in the room? And they’re never going to.

That’s a free kick, Andrew.

I’ll try and keep it shorter. Over the last year it seems that we’ve been flip flopping a bit on NAIRU, neutral rate, is it restrictive, is it not restrictive? Where is the running ceiling for the economy? Do you think our economic models are actually up to the task now? And to the extent that there is all of this uncertainty, how much pressure does that place on the RBA at times like this where we are uncertain to get it right versus get it wrong and where are you erring? So that was about three questions.

It was. That’s right. You didn’t really meet the test.

Very succinct though, I think.

Well, point number one is the RBA central banks in general, but the RBA in particular are fully paid out members of the Sceptical about Macro Models club. Okay. So I wouldn’t and I hope we don’t fall into this trap. If we do, we should put it right. I wouldn’t want you to take away, you’re an expert on this, the idea that our forecasts are we run a model and we write it down. We take models seriously because they help us understand the historical relationships. And so it’s interesting when you mention the NAIRU, right, because our models were throughout last year saying that the NAIRU might be quite high and we, a number of us talked about this idea of testing whether that hypothesis was right or not. And for a period we saw unemployment dipping slightly or staying low and inflation coming back gently to target. Obviously more recently we have not seen that. And actually the irony of that is slightly again, I’m sorry I’m more of a controversialist than perhaps I should be in the central banking community. But the irony of that is it slightly pushes against the premise of your question, which is, as well as treating models with the appropriate amount of disrespect, we should also treat them with some respect because some of those models may have been telling us something at the margin about it. You call it flip flop, if I may. I was told you should never repeat words like that. Becomes a snap. But I mean, the reason policy turned around in February is because the first facts changed. And there are three key facts that change. The first was the world. And I don’t think anyone thought that we would be sitting here in early ‘26 with the global economy powering ahead. Did you see the Taiwanese export statistics, GDP statistics today? Stunning. Because they are producing chips and servers hand over fist into this AI and tech boom.

We trade with these countries and they demand our goods. That’s good news for us. No one expected that. We certainly didn’t. I’ll hold my hand up to that, but I think I’m in good company, possibly including you. The second is our stance of policy, which isn’t just our cash rate, it’s also the credit growth that we were just talking about. It’s also the exceptionally low risk premium in international markets, all of which act to boost demand. And possibly, hands up, we underestimated the extent to which those financial conditions might imply a somewhat less restrictive path for policy than we thought. And the third thing is the surge in private demand relative to supply. In fact, we, and I particularly was expecting that pickup to happen earlier and it didn’t. And our models, again, our models kept saying private demand should be stronger. And there were, you know, poor confidence issues and tone and Trump and all the rest of it were maybe holding things back that models struggle to take seriously. Again, the models were right. They were just right at the wrong time. So I think models are an input. They’re an important input. We treat them sceptically, but we don’t ignore them. And actually one of the lessons I take from the past year is that ignoring them completely might be a bit of a mistake. But uncertainty is with us. I grew up in the 70s. I know I don’t look that old, but I do and I sometimes look a bit askance at this idea that uncertainty today is actually spectacularly higher than in the 70s when the IRA was blowing up London, in the UK when there were more wars than you could eat your breakfast off, et cetera, et cetera. Uncertainty has always been with us and it’s a challenge, but it’s one that we take in our stride.

Very good, thanks, Andrew. If you had time for a couple more questions.

Yeah, long questions, long answers.

And one over here?

If questioner asks a question about our 2027 Q3 forecast, am I allowed to not answer it?

I’m not going to ask that in this, in this audience. I actually wanted to come back to something that you raised which was around the strength of credit growth. And, and I think it’s a fair comment to say that economists generally, not just the Reserve Bank’s, perhaps miss some of the signals from the broader part of the economy. So we know that credit growth is running strong. We’ve obviously started or hiked rates. When you look at broader financial conditions. And we have seen an increased amount of referencing to broader financial conditions from RBA communications, we did a bit of a count on that. So I guess my question is we’ve seen, when we measure it, and our financial conditions index looks pretty similar to yours. We have seen some tightening in financial conditions since November. When we look at what’s driven that, though, it’s all been driven by the components that are related to rate hike expectations. Everything else inside our FCI, those broader measures, whether it’s house prices, credit growth, those are still sitting in expansionary territory or sort of close to neutral. So I guess I’m interested in, how do you think that resolves itself? Is it the case that we have to keep rate hike expectations until those broader measures tighten up, or is there another path to sustainable tightening of financial conditions?

If you ever stop being an economist, I think you’d be a very good used car salesman because you may have noticed that she’s pitched her product to all of you. So those few of you who aren’t clients already will know that they have a new financial conditions index, which you’ve just heard quite a lot about actually. So have you got the exchange rate in there?

Have we got what sorry?

Have you got the exchange rate in your index? Because of course that is appreciated and the number of colleagues in the room who are exporting will probably be conscious of that or will be conscious of that, that has tightened financial conditions. So I assume it’s not just the pickup in the curve that’s done that, but also the exchange rate. But you’re right that if you look at some of those other measures they remain on the accommodative side. Many of them are functions of things that we, well, they’re all functions of things actually that we don’t directly control. Part of it, if you believe in the normal transmission mechanism would be the higher cash rate in due course should feed through into some of those things. We were talking about our colleagues concern here earlier that we’re going to kill the housing market. I don’t think we are but you know we will obviously alert to the possibility of a sharper slowdown there so there’ll be some pass through in time. But some of these things are driven by this very buoyant global economy and we have to take that into account. And you know, I just want to come back to this point because there seems to have been some debate about it. Inflation is too high and we will do what it takes to bring it back down. We’re not doing that because we’re inflation nutters as Mervyn King once called central bankers or because we’re somehow out to help the interests of the banks or some other special group. It’s being done because we know the pain that that causes households and all of you in the room when inflation is too high and out of control and I’m very conscious people sometimes say do you feel under pressure politically or otherwise? The pressure we are under is to get inflation back to target. And if things like the kind of thing you mentioned flash red on the upside, that will be part of our assessment, I can assure you.

Okay, thanks, we’ll keep going. We’ll just see how we’re going for time after that.

Okay, well thank you to the two Andrews, it’s been outstanding and Andrew, thank you very much. No, this one, the English one, it’s great to have somebody from our mother country who has embraced Australia, its economy and its social system so carefully and well and I think that’s been a wonderful addition to the team at the RBA.

My dad, ladies and gentlemen.

What I appreciated today, you honour the RBA or the central-backed rule of staying within the rails and setting interest rates and things like that based entirely on the current situation in the economy and the policies that the government are following. So you don’t seek to become part of another element in sort of management of the government or anything like that. You keep within your rails. And I think that actually makes you far more reliable and far more trustworthy, I think, to the general population, certainly to the business population. So thank you very much, keep up the great work. Now, the next question may be a little bit risky. Is there another country in the world that’s got a better economic policy and outlook than Australia?

An easy one.

I don’t think normative comparisons of economic policies are probably very productive, if I take a few examples. The US is a fascinating example, right, where you may say that. And let’s be clear, public policy, fiscal policy is for governments. Governments are elected and unelected by the public, and that is the system by which those judgments should get made. And that’s why I think it is quite difficult to compare other countries. But what you’ve seen in the US is a very clear attempt to change the policy framework. As I say, could I agree with it, you may disagree with it, but it’s very dramatic. Right alongside that you’ve had this absolutely extraordinary technology and AI boom, which some people think is a mirage and some people think is extraordinary. And of course, like most of these things, it’ll be somewhere in between. Anyone that’s used AI know it’s absolutely terrible at some things and quite spectacularly good at others. And so the very fact that these two things have coincided, I’ve been talking to people, is it causally linked somehow? I can’t work out how. I think it’s pure chance. But it is an extraordinary combination of things and has led to this complete counterfactual that we’ve all had to deal with, all of us who are forecasting, about everyone thinking the world was going to go to hell in a handbasket in ‘25, possible recession, possible crisis. And in fact it surged forward, not off the back of those policy decisions, which you can agree or disagree with, but off the back of this quite separate productivity, I’m not going to say miracle, but boom on the back of tech. And that’s been extraordinary. Now, is that the result of policy, proactive policy or policy neglect? I don’t know. I come from a country that’s made a major trade decision itself some years ago, which seemed to have no impact at the time. But 10 years on, you only have to look at the news about the UK and its political and economic challenges to see that there clearly were consequences for that.

So I think when you think about the tariff impact of the US tariffs and whether are they going to have effect over some period, they may well do over five or ten years, even if they don’t, over the period ahead. Take China, which is obviously our major, single biggest trading partner. Its policy stance is fascinating. It has to deliver for the purpose of its political credibility, this growth target. There’s a big debate going on in China at the moment about whether it’s four and a half, four, three quarters or five, but it’s not going to be one and it’s not going to be two like our number. And so you really do see a very, very wide variety of different kinds of policy choices here. Responding to the challenge. I do think it’s always dangerous for central bankers to take any credit. Mission accomplished. Remember the George Bush thing on the boat and how bad that now looks to take credit? But the Australian economy isn’t doing too badly at the moment. What we do need to do is re-launch those animal spirits. That growth sensibility that I talked about at the beginning, I think you’re all talking about. It has the institutional strength, it has the flexibility and it has the know how to really actually navigate this complicated future world. The question about uncertainty. One of the interesting things I think about Australian history and I have looked at this a bit, is that Australia has often done best out of terrific adversity, whether domestically or whether internationally. And that’s because of its combination of great merits. And so I, you know, I think you can score yourselves. I won’t take it on me. I think you can score yourselves okay. And with a following wind on this productivity challenge, I think there’s real opportunity.

Very good. I’m going to have time for just one more question. Unfortunately, if we kept going, we could be going to afternoon tea and dinner time. But one last question over here. Thank you.

So, Deputy Governor David Chow from ABC News. I’ll be trying to be quite succinct with this one. So apart from Japan, Australia is the only other major economy to start lifting interest rates recently. So what makes Australian rates and the inflation situation here so different to other economies like the UK, Europe and the USA? And also, do you have any thoughts on the level of government spending here and its contribution to inflation relative to those other countries?

Give the man a prize.

Somebody had to get it in.

Well, someone’s editor has told someone that. You bloody well better ask that question. Shall I go long on the first question? I think this question. Second one as well, please. Yeah, yeah. Okay. In your dreams. To the first question. Let me take you back to medieval times. I don’t know how long we’ve got. I think it’s an interesting point. So I was talking to some major investors yesterday and they were very much saying, look, know Australia stands out for its position in the cycle. And let’s remember we had a different policy strategy to many other countries. We didn’t raise interest rates as far up during the COVID inflation boom and that meant we were slower to bring them down as well. A consequence of that, I think it’s fair to say, and we were talking earlier about uncertainty over output gaps is that this economy is clearly closer to balance than many of the other economies that you might have in mind. So New Zealand is obviously very close, had a big negative output gap opening up, economy slowed sharply, went into recession. Canada has obviously had its own massive challenges with the U.S. Europe has its own structural growth challenges. So most of those other countries are nowhere near as close to balance as the Australian economy. And I talked about this in the Melbourne Cup speech. It’s in a way the backside of that success of keeping the economy close to balance, that even relatively small demand shocks of the kind we had last year can lift inflation a bit and cause policy to need to respond. Now, we don’t know whether this pickup in inflation is going to be wholly temporary, wholly permanent, somewhere in between. That’s the big debate amongst all of the economists in the room and us at the moment. And we’ll, we’ll look at the data and we’ll take our view, but I think it’s fair to say that it’s a consequence of that. I’d say hubris is a dangerous thing, but relative success of holding the economy close to balance, that we are now facing into the inflationary challenges of that pickup in demand that we’re seeing globally a little bit earlier than others. We clearly also have learned things about the domestic economy as well. But let’s see, are we the first mover in a number of countries beginning to tighten policy over the next year or two, or are we a complete idiosyncratic case with its own domestic issues and nothing of the kind? I think that’s a really interesting question and I’m not sure which way it goes. What was your question the second one again?

Yeah, look, I’m interested in your thoughts on, you know, the government’s level of spending, its contribution to inflation relative to those other countries of lower and steady rates.

Look, I said it already and I’ll say it again. Commenting on the political choices of a government is not for a central bank. There’s been a lot of criticism at the central bank in the last week or two of not speaking up. But I was taught very clearly that we have a job to do with inflation and we have to keep employment close to full employment. And as I said at the beginning, and I’ll say again, we’re going to take that statutory duty very, very seriously. We’re an equal opportunity monetary policymaker. A dollar of demand that comes from the public sector, a dollar of demand that comes from the private sector should be counted exactly the same in terms of its impact on inflation. The composition of total demand is for the government to determine and the public will determine whether they agree or disagree with that in the normal way. Australia has an extremely robust electoral system. And I think it’s interesting when people sometimes say the central bank should come in and support their view against the government, you should be attacking them. I always think it’s worth asking them, what if we were coming in and taking the opposite view to you? Unelected officials, some of them from other countries, making a comment about the decisions of a publicly elected government. There are circumstances where the debt position, for example, of a country is so out of hand that it can directly threaten monetary stability. I lived through the LDI period in the UK, as I think you probably know, when confidence was lost from international investors in the UK for a period, and that directly threatened monetary stability. At that point, we had no choice given at the Bank of England, never allowed to call we anymore, they had no choice at the Bank of England to intervene to maintain monetary and financial stability. But outside those extreme events, if you ever see a technocrat like me walking into the public arena and saying, do you know what? I think you could do this better. Who the hell are you to actually make that comment? That is the mindset that I was brought up in as a central banker. I was also brought up to learn that if you’re supposed to be targeting something that’s two and a half and inflation is actually 3.4, you probably should get back to your day job. And that’s what we’ll be doing.

Well navigated, Andrew. On that note, my sincere apologies to those who had questions, but we’ve run out of time, so I’m going to have to call time on it.