NEW YORK (S&P Global Ratings) Nov. 6, 2019--New York City voters have passed a charter amendment allowing the city to create a formal budgetary reserve, or "rainy day" fund, and S&P Global Ratings believes that this reserve could stabilize the city's financial position during an economic downturn when personal income and sales tax collections could soften, such collections being the city's main sources of operating revenue. The city was previously prohibited from creating such a fund under the Financial Emergency Act. New York State passed the act following the city's financial crisis in the 1970s. In recent history, the city used the current-year surplus, which other cities may deposit into a rainy day fund, to prepay subsequent-year expenditures (primarily debt
