If the economy needs lower interest rates, that's just what the economy will get, according to Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens.
Mr Stevens says he is content with current policy settings, with the record-low 2.5 per cent cash rate having its desired effect on the economy.
But he said the central bank was prepared to do more if it needed to.
"Low interest rates are doing the sorts of things they normally do in most respects," Mr Stevens said on Tuesday following his annual Anika Foundation speech.
"I'd still maintain up to this point that we're doing what can reasonably be done, but if there's more that can reasonably be done at some point, then obviously we'd do that."
In his prepared speech, which dealt with the global economy rather than Australia in particular, Mr Stevens said effective monetary policy measures had stopped the crisis in 2008 from developing into the "Great Depression Mark II".
"We might not like the politics or the optics of it all - all the bailouts, the sense that some people who behaved irresponsibly got away with it, the recriminations, the second-guessing after the event and so on," he said.
"But the alternative was worse."
High levels of government debt in many countries had limited their ability to use government spending to boost growth following the crisis, but monetary policy had its difficulties too, he said.
Interest rates can be pushed down, even to the "zero lower bound" reached by the US and Japan.
"But if people simply don't wish to take on new business risks, monetary policy can't make them," Mr Stevens said.
He rejected the notion that it was low population growth, slower growth in productivity or overinvestment in unproductive assets that had caused entrepreneurs' expectations of profits to fall too far for low interest rates to work.
"Perhaps the answer is simply subdued animal spirits - low levels of confidence."
But he warned that low investment caused by depressed confidence "could be a self-reinforcing equilibrium", and that monetary policy by itself might not be able to snap economies out of it.
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