In particular, once the Committee had cut the federal funds rate to near zero in late 2008, it became necessary to deploy new tools to supply the considerable monetary accommodation required by the extremely weak state of the job market and 7 2/8  BIS central bankers' speeches  persistently low inflation.7 Those tools—especially our large-scale securities purchases and increasingly explicit forward guidance pertaining to the likely future path of the federal funds rate —enabled the Federal Reserve to provide necessary additional support to the U.S. economy by pushing down longer-term interest rates and easing financial conditions more generally.
It would be a mistake to say we have to adopt tight policy to keep the rand strong. My point is more subtle: what counts as tight or loose policy is changing, as global rates rise. If we do not recalibrate our policy settings accordingly, we could wind up with destabilising policy, which would be bad for inflation and also bad for domestic demand.