These actions quickly brought overnight interest rates down, but financial institutions remained reluctant to lend to each other for any but the very shortest maturities, prompting central banks to take several extraordinary steps to help support longer-term funding markets.
Many central banks increased their longer-maturity lending and expanded the set of assets they accepted as collateral to further help banks that found themselves with suddenly illiquid assets. The ECB, which had regularly auctioned longer-term funds, increased both the size and frequency of those auctions. The Bank of England and the Bank of Canada conducted similar term funding operations in their own currencies.