From the perspective of government finances, however, healthy local economies will also be necessary if state governments are to successfully confront some difficult, longer-term fiscal issues.
On 16 March, after an extraordinary meeting the MPC decided to provide further monetary stimulus and cut the OCR by 75 basis points to 0.25 percent, and indicated that a Large Scale Asset Purchase (LSAP) programme of NZ Government Bonds would be the next tool deployed if required.8 It is hard to overstate the strain on global markets through this period.