Federal Reserve operations for monetary policy purposes in longer-term securities markets had largely been absent since the Operation Twist experiment of the early 1960s (see, for example, Meltzer (2009, pp. 316-23)).
In the United Kingdom, operations in longer-term securities markets had continued to figure importantly in monetary policy until the mid-1980s, reflecting attempts by the authorities to influence the term structure of interest rates or to control the stock of money or the volume of liquidity (see Fischer (1987), Goodhart (1999), and Batini and Nelson (2005)).