I'll ask him about this tomorrow

I look forward to it.

As an aside, amongst things I didn't report at the time were a well known businessman's not entirely light hearted comment at the height of the crisis along the lines of ``at least New Zealand has plenty of fresh water and capacity to produce food''. Or the (probably apocryphal) anecdote about how quickly civil order broke down in Albania after the cash machines stopped working due to their localised financial crisis in the late nineties.

Well, it's more Bollard's account

I suspect I'm taking umbrage more with your interpretation of Bollard's account, ie that we weren't doing our job very well, rather the account itself.

I've not read the book yet so I have to rely on my colleague Brian Fallow's take on it in this regard but I'm more than than comfortable doing that.

I don't accept your criticism Russell.

I'm not sure that I or any of my colleagues at the Herald had any conversations with RBNZ about whether or not we would report the imminent failure of our banking sector before it was apparent, but we certainly often had these discussions amongst ourselves.

Helping precipitate a full blown run on our banks and the attendant misery by reporting early signs of it is not the kind of scoop I want on my CV.

If I'd felt otherwise, I suspect it wouldn't have been as easy as asking Grant Spencer (Bollard was away at a Bank of International Settlements meeting in May 09 and generally doesn't front FSRs anyway) how safe our banks were seven months after the worst of the crisis.

As it goes, I was asking how safe our banks were 15 months or even a couple of years earlier.

The statement you quote Bollard referring to looked to me like clear signs of shakiness.

[n]one of the media asked what might trigger interventions. And we had another week or two to work out for ourselves just what our response may be.

I can't recall whether I asked the RBNZ for details around this particular statement or not, but I've found they invariably deal with such inquiries by flatly declining to answer them.
As Raymond puts it:

an honest answer might have brought the whole shakey structure down

And the guarantee?

As for how desperate things were behind the scenes, I think we gave a pretty good flavour a year after Lehman's collapse, months before Bollard's book.