Bank of the Fed Starts Operations

Amidst all the bad news, there is some good news. The Bank of the Fed is open for business and it's helping a lot. The Fed tripled its working capital duration window on Monday and commercial paper volume in those durations (>20 days) is now running only moderately below the year's averages and about twice the rate of the last two weeks in September. The market has shifted hard to asset-backed paper, which I assume reflects a Fed collateral requirement. In the longer durations asset-backed paper is at volumes far above typical averages while all other CP markets are virtually shut down.

http://www.federalreserve.gov/
re...volumestats.htm

The A2/P2 spread is down, to "only" 2.93. Still twice that of the 74-75 recession, but probably an overestimate since the market is obviously restricted in its ability to handle that kind of paper. So perhaps the market is only predicting the worst recession since 1937 now rather than a depression.

http://www.federalreserve.gov/re...ov/releases/cp/