f it's disrupted, the functioning of every market will be impaired. The Fed's purchase of securities is explicitly aimed at improving the functioning of the Treasury and MBS markets, where market liquidity had been well below par in recent days." But targeting the Treasury market proved insufficient, given the severity of the COVID recession and the disruption of flows of credit across other financial markets. So the Fed intervened directly in the markets for corporate and municipal debt to ensure that key economic actors could raise funds to pay workers and avoid bankruptcies. These measures aimed to help businesses survive the crisis and resume hiring and production when the pandemic ebbed