April 16, 2020 The Federal Reserve on Thursday announced that its Paycheck Protection Program Liquidity Facility is fully operational and available to provide liquidity to eligible financial institutions, which will help support small businesses. The Small Business Administration's Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP, guarantees loans extended by qualified lenders to small businesses so that those businesses can keep workers employed. The Federal Reserve's facility will support the effectiveness of the PPP by extending credit to financial institutions that make PPP loans,...

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April 15, 2020 Today, the Commission, in cooperation with the President of the European Council, has put forward a European roadmap to phase-out the containment measures due to the coronavirus outbreak. While we are still in firefighting mode, the necessary extraordinary measures taken by Member States and the EU are working. They have slowed down the spread of the virus and saved thousands of lives. However, these measures and the corresponding uncertainty come at a dramatic cost to people, society and the economy,...

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April 14, 2020 The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an unprecedented human and health crisis. The measures necessary to contain the virus have triggered an economic downturn. At this point, there is great uncertainty about its severity and length. The latest Global Financial Stability Report shows that the financial system has already felt a dramatic impact, and a further intensification of the crisis could affect global financial stability. Since the pandemic’s outbreak, prices of risk assets have fallen sharply. At the worst point of the recent...

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