For want of $200 billion

Green co-leader Russel Norman wanted to know why the government doesn’t intervene to bring down the value of the dollar.

Finance Minister Bill English told him:

The Government focuses on those things it can influence. To actually have a direct impact on the exchange rate you need to have a couple of hundred billion US dollars in the bank—and we do not; we actually owe hundreds of billions—and it helps if you are not a democracy. That is a feature of those countries that do directly manage their exchange rates, but that is not where we are.

For want of a couple of hundred billion and becasue we’re a democracy, we’re stuck with the market setting the value of our dollar rather than politicians.