Once in a while the Reserve Bank likes to make a big splash with a rates decision. Slashing rates by 1 percentage point when the market was tipping half a point - that's a splash.
So, what is the Reserve trying to tell us?
One interpretation of today's decision is that the Reserve knows something we don't know. In other words, the situation has become so dire particularly in the banking sector that the cavalry had to be called in.
However, financial markets were expecting one percentage point, or 100 basis points, of rate cuts by the end of the year. Today's move, therefore, just cuts out the waiting time, delivering all the rate cuts at once.
If the RBA was happy to drop its cash rate to 6% by the end of the year, the biggest banking crisis in 50 years is a pretty good excuse for lowering it now.
Explaining the decision, the Reserve highlighted international, not local, strains.
The two reasons it put forward for the big cut were that the global outlook had taken a serious turn for the worse, and bank funding costs had risen.
As ABN Amro's Greg Gibbs puts it: "So the reason that the RBA sliced rates aggressively apply to every country.
"The actions by the RBA appear to be as much a wake up call to other central banks, asking what are you waiting for, cut rates and do so aggressively''.
And then there's Australia's banks, and how much of the Reserve's cut they intend to pass on.
Here, we have to understand that a central bank's major concern are the interest rates charged in the broader community by mortgage holders, credit card users, and small businesses.
If it is trying to ensure borrowers pay lower interest rates, and it knows the banks are playing coy about passing on reductions in the official rate, the Reserve can simply make a bigger cut.
And if the banks get a boost to their profit margin by keeping some of the cut to themselves, by only passing on 0.5 percentage points, so be it.
And Rudd and Swan will have to cope with the political fallout.
