It is an honour. People are shaped by formative events, and Edward Owen Giblin Shann was no exception. Born in Hobart in 1884, his family moved to Melbourne a few years later. Growing up in the Depression of the 1890s – an episode that hit Melbourne particularly hard – Shann saw firsthand the effect that financial crises could have on peoples’ lives.
In particular, the unemployment rate still stood above our assessment of its longer-run normal level—that is, the unemployment rate that we expect to prevail when the economy is operating at maximum employment—and inflation remained below the 2 percent objective.