It is often suggested that the policies of central banks and governments have rescued western market economies from a far worse outcome than the Great Recession of 2008–9. Fiscal policy accompanied the strong monetary policies. A second case of unprecedented monetary policy action has been the recent massive 3-year liquidity provision by the ECB.
The latter measure was designed to counter the freezing of credit markets in the euro area. In this latter case, there was no accompanying fiscal policy. Looking at the current mix of policies, the general picture is that central banks in many advanced market economies continue to have policy interest rates near or at the effective  1  2  See e.g.