These facilities are extensions of our responsibility for promoting financial stability, maximum employment and price stability. Indeed, unlike the institution-specific loans that the Federal Reserve has made that now are subject to GAO audit, these broader market facilities are designed to unfreeze financial markets and lower interest rate spreads in concert with our other monetary policy actions.
The euro has become the currency of an economic area which roughly equals the United States in BIS Review 16/2000  4  terms of economic size and external trade, and which has the world’s second largest capital market.