This included more frequent reporting on transactions, data, and information from market participants on Monday. Although conditions remained calm on that Friday, the simultaneous increase and widening dispersion in repo rates and, importantly, federal funds rates on Monday indicated that markets were not effectively distributing liquidity across the system. The New York Fed’s Markets team 1/5  BIS central bankers' speeches  built a timeline and implementation plan in case the Open Market Desk at the New York Fed (Desk) would need to operate on Tuesday. Early Tuesday morning, it became clear that this situation had persisted and had the potential to become more acute. In response to these developments, and in keeping with the FOMC’s standing directive to the Desk to conduct open market operations as necessary to keep the federal funds rate within the target range, on Tuesday morning the Desk announced and conducted a repo operation. Although such operations were common before the financial crisis, this was the first non-test repo operation in many years. This was followed by repo operations each day since. These actions had the desired effect of reducing strains in markets, narrowing the dispersion of rates, and lowering secured and unsecured rates to more normal levels relative to other benchmarks. The experience of the past week drew attention to the possibility of the development of strains in funding markets around the upcoming end of the quarter.
What, I think, is more useful for businesses to hang on to is our expectation that when Bank Rate does rise, it will probably do so only gradually and to a level that is likely to remain materially below its pre-crisis average of 5% for some while – I have something like a 2–3% range in mind here. That reflects three factors. First, the process of private and public balance sheet repair will continue to weigh on domestic demand for some time, while the recovery in the euro area – our main export market – is likely to remain muted. Second, global longer-term safe real interest rates fell in the years before the crisis, reflecting in particular the unusually high saving rates in China, and this is likely to persist. Third, the spreads between risky market interest rates and Bank Rate are unlikely to return to their excessively compressed pre-crisis levels. So even if we start to withdraw some of the exceptional monetary stimulus in the not too distant future, you should not expect Bank Rate to shoot straight back up to pre-crisis levels. It is now five years since we cut Bank Rate to its historic low of 0.5% and launched our asset purchase programme (QE). Those five years have been tough for both businesses and households. But they surely would have been even tougher had we not taken that action.