When the Reserve Bank of Australia repeatedly throughout 2014 flagged a "period of stability" for interest rates, you could have been forgiven for thinking it was signalling a period of stability for interest rates.
Forgiven, yes, but wrong nonetheless.
It turns out the RBA only meant instability in the upwards direction.
In his testimony to a parliamentary committee on Friday, RBA governor Glenn Stevens explained that it was an exercise in managing perceptions.
"We came to a point where we thought we should sit still and let what we'd already done - which I think was eight or nine moves in the cash rate (it was eight) - time to work," he said.
"We're not thinking of tightening, we're just thinking of letting that work."
But he said the problem in Australia is that as soon as the RBA says it's stopped moving rates one way, the speculation starts that day that rates will head the other way.
That would have been "very unhelpful".
"And so the `stability' language was basically aimed to say `keep calm, don't rush to the other side of the boat, just chill out for a while'," Mr Stevens said.
And he said that approach had some success.
"It didn't stop some people speculating about early rate rises, and they've continued to do so until quite recently, but enough people got the message that I think that that was helpful, for us to say that," he said.
Mr Stevens said he had been looking for the chance to drop the talk of interest rate stability "for months" in the latter half of 2014.
But that course always seemed too risky, possibly leading to expectations of an imminent rate rise, even though it "wasn't coming any time soon".
"So we were either going to have a problem changing the language, or we were going to get to a point where, not having changed the language, we were actually going to make a change in rates," he said.
The RBA this month took the second of those options, a move that most economists had expected soon, but more likely in March.
The Australian dollar dropped one and a half US cents within half an hour after the news of the rate cut last week.
But, Mr Stevens said: "It is not actually our job to make sure that nobody is ever surprised".
"There are going to be surprises from time to time - we don't go out of our way to create them, but if there has to be a few people surprised for us to do the right thing, well, I'm sorry, but, you know, that happens sometimes."
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