glenn stevens a genius? yeah right! He is however a very powerful man, more powerful than Howard and Costello it turned out. Just look at the Nov. 2007 election campaign when he amazingly and inexplicably set a precedent by raising interest rates when the economy was humming along beautifully and inflation was within Peter Costello's target range. Guess what he was wrong to politically, and economically, raise rates then because after the election and after the December/January holiday break he came back to work and dropped the RB interest rate 6 times in 7 months from memory, from FEBRUARY 2008 to AUGUST 2008 with only one month keeping the RB rates on hold during that GFC period. Yeah real political genius, NOT!
this below is from/ http://www.thepowerindex.com.au/money-movers/glenn-stevens
...Glenn Stevens calls himself Sydney's most boring person. And he probably is. Other people call him conservative and overpaid. And he probably is.
In fact, the bald-headed Baptist is the very model of a demure central banker.
"You're this person that nobody knows," David Koch recently told the Reserve Bank boss during an unprecedented Sunrise interview. "And yet you're the bloke who controls their lives."
But preferring the quiet life has not weakened Stevens' power. In a nation of some two-and-a-half million mortgage holders, you can guarantee the entire nation is watching the news on the first Tuesday of each month to sweat on his latest decision.
"Stevens ostensibly controls the 'price of money', so he is extremely powerful," economist Christopher Joye tells The Power Index. "In finance, he is the most powerful person after the Treasurer. Absolutely no doubt."
Stevens first joined the RBA research department in 1980 after graduating with an economics degree from the University of Sydney. He's been at Martin Place ever since. Now, as the man pulling the levers of economic policy, Stevens can move markets and cripple prime ministers. In fact he's probably already done so.
In 2007, when Stevens and his crew decided to raise interest rates to an 11-year high during an election, it spelled doom for a Howard government which had campaigned on the issue. Despite an impassioned plea from the prime minister, Howard was out of office two weeks later.
In one fell swoop, Stevens had proved the board's independence. "It was a triumph of clear thinking. I thought that was absolutely the right position to have," says economist Nicholas Gruen on the unprecedented rate rise.
Stevens' main source of power lies in the Reserve Bank Act 1959, which sets out the tools he and his board have at their disposal to manipulate monetary policy. One of these, of course, is the ability to change the overnight inter-bank cash rate, which is intended to keep inflation within the target rate of 2-3%.
