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Fomc Playbook: The Only New Game In Town?, Thomas Lam

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

In light of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), while taking more aggressive actions, seems to have stuck more or less to the standard playbook of responding to “unusual and exigent circumstances”. This essentially calls for slashing conventional policy rates to their effective lower bound, accompanied by forward guidance, embarking on asset purchases, rolling out emergency liquidity facilities and experimenting with lending programmes. But policymakers, with the required US Treasury backstop, have also introduced more creative programmes to encourage credit extension and reached into different market segments.