A concern expressed in a number of economists' commentaries on monetary policy over the past year is that interest rate cuts may not be stimulating the economy in the way they once did.In a note published last October, CommSec's chief economist, Craig James, said: "With more savers and fewer borrowers, rates cuts have lost potency over time. Despite significant rate cuts over the past year, lending has barely budged while deposits have soared."Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens was asked to comment on this issue when he spoke to the House of Representatives' Standing Committee on Economics last week.Stevens said: "The question of whether policy is getting the same traction is one that we discuss internally. In… [the] number of dimensions in which we have tried to get a handle on…  [this] the answer seems usually to be that it is a bit too early to tell."The Reserve Bank has cut its rates six times since November 2011, taking the cash rate down from 4.75 per cent to three per cent.Stevens said one difference between this round of rate cuts and the previous easing cycle was the exchange rate. Last time the Australian dollar fell, but over the past year the Aussie has been strong."The reason that happened had a lot to do with the perceived changed outlook for the global economy in terms of trade and so on," he said."Certainly, the exchange rate has not come down sharply on this occasion. As I have said, I am a bit surprised it has not come down more than it has. So, perhaps that part of the transmission is a little different."Stevens said household attitudes to borrowing and saving had changed, but it was not clear that this was a long-term change."I think people's changed attitude to debt means that we probably have not seen quite the pick-up in borrowing behaviour that you might have expected in the past, when attitudes to debt were less cautious than they are now. "Even so, I think we are seeing some pick-up there, and we are seeing a rise in house prices. We have seen a rise in share prices. We do see, I think, the early indications of a pick-up in housing construction. All those things, qualitatively at least, are more or less what you would expect."What we are doing is trying to calibrate for the level of the cash rate, to give us what we hope will be about the appropriate response, taking account of the fact that the exchange rate is behaving differently, people's debt attitudes are different and so on. "As for whether changed behaviour will persist through a rate rise cycle, it is probably a little too early to talk about that now."On the impact of the high dollar, Stevens said: "Other things being equal, there is no doubt that a rise in the exchange rate is contractionary for the economy. We have had the terms of trade go up and the exchange rate has played its customary role… [in]