Philip Lowe, governor of the Reserve Bank, said he considers himself fortunate to be alive after having two close calls with death in the months before assuming his current position.
Due to difficulties from a split neck artery that provides blood to the brain, Australia’s senior central banker, 60, had to be rushed to the hospital twice in 2016.
He had a nearly spotless record of health up until that point, missing just one day of work in 35 years owing to an infection in a tooth.
Dr. Lowe abruptly lost consciousness and collapsed from his front-row seat in May 2016 after addressing a gathering of central bankers.
The RBA’s then-deputy governor had just learned the previous evening that he would succeed Glenn Stevens as the bank’s governor.
Dr. Lowe said he could return to his hotel room, but Canadian banking officials called an ambulance, which took him to Ottawa Hospital, where they discovered the life-threatening blood clot and performed emergency surgery.
According to Dr. Lowe, “the next thing I knew, a few hours had passed and I woke up in hospital.”
“They told I would have perished if it had happened to me alone in a hotel room or on an aircraft,”
Dr. Lowe’s uncomfortable upright sleep position on the flight from Sydney to Canada, during which a hostess briefly woke him up because his neck was “bobbling around,” is likely what caused the arterial split.
Doctors feared possible brain damage and were not convinced Dr. Lowe would live even after the clot was removed.
As the RBA sought an urgent flight to send his wife, Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) officer Jocelyn Parker, to Dr. Lowe’s side, she was advised to prepare for bad news.
However, following a battery of tests, Dr. Lowe was given the all-clear and, after two weeks of recuperation in Ottawa, boarded a flight with his wife for Sydney.
Dr. Lowe wasn’t out of the woods yet because he once more passed out at his house in Sydney’s eastern suburbs three weeks later.
Regularly using aspirin to thin his blood had eaten away at the lining of his stomach, resulting in internal bleeding.
Doctors once more worried for his life after being transported to St. Vincent’s Hospital because the bleeding would not stop.
Scott Morrison, the treasurer at the time, started putting emergency measures in place in case Dr. Lowe was unable to succeed Mr. Stevens in September of that year.
Dr. Lowe was once more given the all-clear following ten days in the hospital and numerous blood transfusions.
As there did not appear to be any ongoing impairment from either of his emergencies, Dr. Lowe claimed he had never given thought to not accepting the governorship, which he did in September 2016.
He told the Financial Review, “This is just one of those odd things that can happen to anyone.
I’m simply not permitted to take aspirin.
He attributed his survival to the “world-class” medical care he received in Sydney and Ottawa.
Meetings with his senior peers don’t always seem to be kind to Dr. Lowe.
Last week, he told other international bankers in Switzerland that he must wait three months for inflation data whereas the majority of comparable nations give information on a monthly basis, and they laughed at him.
Dr. Lowe has a huge task ahead of him to stop the inflationary spiral.
The most recent three-monthly data revealed a 5.1% increase, which is the fastest increase since 2001.
On the heels of June’s half-point increase, the steepest in 22 years, the RBA boss signaled that another 0.5 percentage point increase was likely to occur next month.
We talked about 25 basis points or 50 basis points, if you read the minutes of our prior meeting, he remarked.
I don’t want to predict the next meeting, but I believe the topic will come up again in the next one—either 25 or 50 times.