In addition, the Committee announced that the Fed intends to continue the maturity extension program, or “operation twist”, first launched last September. In this program, the Fed is buying $ billion of longer-term Treasuries and selling an equal amount of shorter-term Treasuries, in an effort to reduce yields from already historically low levels.
The FOMC is also continuing to reinvest principal payments from its holdings of agency debt and MBS into MBS in an effort to help mortgage markets. You may know that I dissented from the FOMC decisions in August and September because it was not clear to me that further monetary policy accommodation was appropriate.