National Bank chief economist Cameron Bagrie said in an interview that the key to the package's success or failure would be whether trust was restored to financial systems.
"Is it going to help restore a bit of confidence to the market, or will the market gloss over it?" Mr Bagrie said.
The New Zealand Stock Exchange top 50 index was yesterday largely unchanged from Friday's close, ending trade at 3188.54 on turnover of $23 million, the 90-day bank bill rate closed at 8.03%, down 0.07 percentage points, and the NZ dollar lost 0.23c to 68.56 against the US dollar.
The biggest US bail-out in history won the tentative support of both presidential candidates and went to the House for a vote yesterday.
Mr Bagrie said the package was designed to minimise panic and encourage the financial system to start operating again.
"When we get a bit of certainty, people will come back and start doing deals and business will function in an orderly fashion. What we are seeing at the moment are things are quite dysfunctional."
He would be looking at the exchange rate, activity on equity and credit markets and interaction between banks around the world as a sign whether the US Government has managed to mitigate a potential meltdown of the financial sector.
Even if US markets embraced the rescue package, Mr Bagrie said the NZ economy would still be impacted through lower demand for our exports, lower commodity prices and a high cost of international credit due to continued uncertainty.
The plan gave the US Government broad power to use billions of taxpayer dollars to purchase devalued mortgage-related assets held by cash-starved financial firms in the hope of unlocking frozen credit.
As part of the cross-party agreement, Congress succeeded in getting greater control of the money, ensuring the Government was paid back by companies which got help and for the Government to insure some bad home loans rather then buying them.
The package was only open to companies which denied their executives golden parachutes and limited their pay packets.
The Government would also receive stock warrants in return for the bail-out, giving taxpayers a chance to share in future profits.
Mr Bagrie said irrespective of the crisis, the New Zealand economy was always going to have a period of correction after five years of rising asset prices driving consumer euphoria and resulting in rising expenditure, higher profits and employment and leveraging for extra borrowing.
It was similar to what was happening in other economies.
"We have gone from one side of the coin where people were remarkably risk-seeking to a situation where the only game in town is capital preservation."
He expected economic upheaval to continue in New Zealand into next year, but he said the country's macroeconomic framework had handled the international credit crisis well.
The exchange rate had eased and the Reserve Bank had cut the official cash rate by 75 basis points and had indicated further cuts were likely.
"There are a couple of pillars of the economic framework that have responded and are a sign of a very well functioning economic framework."
There was no magic bullet to solving the crisis, rather a series of steps which would mitigate the risk and reduce the panic that has crippled the sector for the past two weeks.
ASB chief economist Nick Tuffley said the US Government had no choice but to step it, even if it was seen as unfairly bailing out the financial sector and not struggling families.
"However, leaving the US credit markets to continue their dysfunctional state would ultimately do ordinary Americans more lasting harm through creating a more prolonged downturn in the US."
Mr Tuffley said the New Zealand dollar would continue to adjust over time and he believed the US dollar had bottomed out against major currencies and would offer further NZ-US cross rate appreciation.
