Faced with unprecedented financial stresses and sharp contractions in economic activity, many central banks, including the Federal Reserve, responded with extraordinary measures.
In the United States, we lowered the federal funds rate target to a range of 0 to 1/4 percent to help mitigate the economic downturn; we expanded the scale, scope, and maturity of our lending to provide needed liquidity to financial institutions and to address dislocations in financial markets; we jointly established currency swap lines with foreign central banks (including the Bank of Japan) to ensure the global availability of dollar funding; and we purchased a large quantity of longer-term securities to help improve the functioning of financial markets and support economic recovery.