Alan Bollard: Dealing with debt Speech by Dr Alan Bollard, Governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, and Mr Michael Reddell, to the Employers and Manufacturers Association, Auckland, 6 August 2012. *  *  *  Introduction Households, firms, and governments across much of the advanced world have taken on very large amounts of debt in the last couple of decades.
In New Zealand, for example, the private sector owes three times what it did in 1998. People and governments are now living with the aftermath; dealing with the debt. Many individual lives will have been irreversibly changed. Even at an aggregate economy level, it looks as though we could be dealing with the aftermath for quite some time yet.