Our judgment is that we have considerable excess capacity and that continued monetary stimulus is needed to close the gap and bring inflation sustainably to target. But we take account of our uncertainty around the degree of slack by considering a range of possible slack estimates in our deliberations. Another important building block of our policy framework is the neutral rate of interest.
BIS Review 77/2010  1  At the Federal Reserve, we have been working to facilitate the flow of credit to viable small businesses. We helped in bringing capital from the securities markets to small businesses through the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility – the TALF program.