GLENN Stevens had obviously been doing a lot of thinking about the limits to monetary policy recently.
The Reserve Bank of Australia governor on Wednesday gave a speech in Thailand dwelling on the topic.
In particular, his speech implied the need to take financial stability into the setting of interest rates meant less scope to fine-tune growth in the short term.
The discussion of the need to incorporate financial stability into the way central banks use monetary policy expanded on a theme he explored in the opening remarks made at a conference in August but released to the public only on Tuesday.
"If there were any thought that controlling inflation over a two or three year horizon was enough, we have been well and truly disabused of that by experience over the past half decade," he said, closely echoing the comments published the day before.
But there was something a little newer in the Bangkok speech - a greater focus on financial stability might temper efforts to boost growth over the short term.
While the long period of economic stability of the 1990s and early 2000s scored highly in terms of low inflation and strong economic growth, it was ultimately harmful to financial stability and therefore to macroeconomic stability, he said.
The apparently benign environment encouraged the belief that increased leverage (borrowing) was safe.
"But higher leverage exposed people to more distress if and when a large negative shock eventually came along," he said.
So central banks now had to work out how to incorporate financial stability into their monetary policy settings.
"We will have to accept the occasional need to make a judgement about short-term trade-offs, but that is the nature of policymaking," he said.
The trade-off he referred to is that interest rates might not be cut as far as they might previously have been, in order to avoid unwanted behaviour in financial markets.
The obvious example was the housing boom and associated credit binge sparked by the US Federal Reserve's ultra-low interest rates following the share market crash in 2000.
Mr Stevens made it clear at the outset that he wasn't speaking about the current situation in Australia.
Even so, his speech does suggest that when the RBA meets in February to work out whether to cut the cash rate to a new 50-year low, it will not just be mindful of the potential for low interest rates to cause consumer prices to rise to fast.
It will be also considering the potential for the move to encourage excessive borrowing and inflation in the markets for assets like shares or housing.
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