I saw the RBI governor's press conference announcing the new credit policy. I think he has a greenspanish demeanour though i shud agree that he is humorous at times. In fact, he handled the questions well with ease and putting in humor whereever necessary.
RBI has not altered any of its rates - bank rate, repo rate ... Also he has told banks to up their credit income and not rely on bond/gsec incomes.
Two things are important:
a) A halt to the softening of interest rates was kind of indicated
b) The rupee's depreciation is also probably halted because of this.
Also via this, he has also given a kind of warning to esp the public sector banks (whose earnings from interest rate cuts is more than double that of credit income!!) to stop dabbling their extra money (coming thro a variety of factors - cut in crr rate, increase in income et..) in buying govt gilts in anticipation of a reduction of interest rates. This according to me was a brilliant move (though the stock rally of the banks should have made things obvious to even lay men like me) delivered with ease.
I also think that this kind of negative sentiment (of no reduction of rates) was again brilliantly camaflouged by statements of india's growing GDP and reducing inflation. (It kind of made the market happy though they were expecting a 25 basis point cut). But going into the numbers of gdp growth makes us realise how much dependent on monsoon we are. ( The increase is solely due to the increase in agri contribution and not the services/manufacturing sector which contribute 50 and 25% respectively).