Figure 1 presents such an outlook, one based on a survey of the Federal Reserve’s primary dealers conducted during the week prior to the September FOMC meeting. The baseline paths through 2015 of the unemployment rate and inflation shown by the solid black lines in the upper two panels track the median of the dealers’ forecasts of these variables.
Methods of providing liquidity included open-market purchases, intra-day overdrafts that were well above normal levels, discount-window lending, the crediting of banks on regular schedules for checks in process of collection, securities lending, and currency swaps that allowed foreign central banks to provide dollar liquidity to financial institutions in their own countries (Ferguson, 2003).