The Federal Reserve interventions in private securities markets in the spring of 2020 extended its 2008 playbook from buying high quality short-term paper to bonds, and departed from it by buying junk bonds. In March 2020, the Fed reprised its last-resort lending to primary dealers, accepting...

By the 1990s, basis risk had caused bond markets, like money markets before them, to start shifting from the use of government rates as benchmarks to the use of private ones. Developments since the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-09, including derivatives reforms and Libor scandals, had the...