Asia Risk 15: Philip Combes, New Zealand Treasury

For much of the first decade of this century, the New Zealand Debt Management Office (NZDMO) looked after both the New Zealand government’s debt and asset management operations in a steady state environment, running an annual bond issuance programme of around NZ$2.5 billion ($1.8 billion) and bond outstandings of approximately NZ$20 billion.

Our philosophy was to maintain the issuance programme – even though the government had been running surpluses for well over a decade and had no need to