Many dealers were too busy dealing with the extreme volatility to talk, one saying it was the busiest day of his life.
A rescue package announced by the Reserve Bank of Australia at 4.30pm NZ time barely lifted the Aussie off its lows – it traded a similar five US cent range – and the kiwi along with it.
The RBA's cash rate now stands at 0.25 per cent from 0.5 per cent previously, on a par with the RBNZ's official cash rate.
Among other measures, the RBA promised to continue providing short-term liquidity and offered to lend at least A$90 billion ($90.3b) to banks for three years fixed at 0.25 per cent, so long as they lent it to businesses, particularly small- to medium-sized firms.
Hamish Pepper, fixed-income and currency strategist at Harbour Asset Management, said risk sentiment amid the worsening coronavirus crisis had taken hold.
"We've moved away from some of those dynamics that we might've talked about that were supporting the kiwi dollar, such as relative interest rates and the terms of trade," Pepper said.
And foreign investors are now demanding greater compensation for holding NZ government bonds – the yield on the April 2029 bond, for example, jumped more than 30 basis points to 1.77 per cent today.
The government's $12.1b economic rescue package, which amounts to about 4 per cent of GDP, will require a $3b increase in bond sales and $1b of Treasury bills.
"New Zealand has always had some reliance on global funding and I guess, in times of stress, those who provide funding to New Zealand will demand greater reward for that and a lower currency is one way of doing that," Pepper said.
Offshore investors owned almost 54 per cent of New Zealand government bonds at the end of February, according to Reserve Bank data.
Globally, almost 220,000 people are known to be infected with the virus and deaths are approaching 9,000. More countries are going into lock-down to try to slow the virus's spread.
New Zealand's infected now number 28, all of them travellers or relatives of travellers, and there are no known cases of community infection yet.
In another effort to limit the virus's spread, on top of requiring all travellers to self-quarantine for two weeks after arrival, the government today banned indoor gatherings of more than 100 people.
The New Zealand dollar was trading at 99.50 Australian cents at 5pm, from 98.99 cents the same time yesterday. It was at 48.05 British pence from 49.19, at 50.75 euro cents from 54.03, at 60.48 yen from 63.86 and at 3.9120 Chinese yuan from 4.1775.
The bid price on the two-year swap rate rose to 0.8050 per cent from 0.7154 yesterday while the 10-year swaps climbed to 1.5700 per cent from 1.2800 per cent.
