The RBNZ surprised markets with a deeper than expected cut to the OCR. Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr said the bank's Monetary Policy Committee "tossed and turned around" before decided to cut the rate by a full 50 basis points to one percent, in hopes of stimulating the economy against a global slowdown. Economists had forecast just a 0.25 percent cut."It was a really interesting discussion we had with the committee … over recent days the committee became increasingly convinced that 'more sooner' is a safer strategy to achieving our targets than slower for longer," Orr said."And, in a sense, it's around the regret analysis: in a year's time, I would far prefer to be sitting here with the quality problem of thinking: 'wow, inflation expectations are getting away on us; we might have to start thinking about other activity'. And so, it's a much nicer challenge to have a monetary policy than in doing too little too late."He told Banking Day it was "absolutely a concern" that the banks may be reluctant to pass on all, or even most, of the cut to retail customers and the regulator would be watching to see what they did.Orr added that the RBNZ was watching all aspects of retail lending closely, including lending to small businesses and agribusiness and gave a message to the Australian-owned banks about their responsibility to be "good citizens" of New Zealand."It is unambiguous that credit conditions have tightened for some sectors of the economy because retail banks' appetites have changed, and that has been particularly true for the agricultural sector," he said. "So - everyone loves lending to housing because they think it's nice and simple and they don't have to hold much capital to do that. But the banks themselves are looking at 10 years of seriously aggressive lending to the farming sectors, and they're all having a moment of consideration at the moment around what to do. "Banks should be independent of the interest rate. That's about them trying to retain their customers; them being good citizens of this country for good times and bad; lending to the agricultural sector. And we're having a lot of conversations about that. I know a lot of banks were wanting to, I suppose, effectively hide behind our possible changes to the capital ratios as their excuse to exit farming. But we've made it very clear that it's their issue that they've built that they need to work through with their customers."With interest rates heading down closer to zero, Orr said the regulator was ramping up its work on the consideration of unconventional monetary policies such as quantitative easing.  Asked if there was a role for much broader public consultations or even involvement of the executive or Parliament in decisions around QE, negative interest rates or 'helicopter money', Orr said: "I will no, but we would certainly operate with no surprises"."All of these things will have to be done with the full understanding of the whole of government. But it