Last week, we linked to a couple of overviews of the recent rash of government schemes to ease credit conditions.
We now have a lot more detail about how one of those schemes - the £50bn Asset Purchase Facility - will work.
The simple goal of the Asset Purchase Facility is to increase the access to finance for really large companies. Larger businesses tend to borrow from credit markets, not banks. But these markets have been essentially frozen since the summer of 2007.
The Bank's Asset Purchase Facility is a kind of middle man between markets and corporates. The BoE will sell Treasury bonds to the credit markets to raise cash. It then takes that cash and buys commercial paper (short-term debt from large companies) and corporate bonds (longer-term debt).
The sum result is that while there is no new money directly created by these transactions, the BoE is able to channel existing credit to markets - in this case very large companies - that need it.
In light of today's Bank of England Inflation Report, EEF's Chief Economist Stephen Radley notes, however, that if the BoE feels that the economy is deteriorating too fast and that deflation is a more realistic threat, the APF could take on a less boring role:
"The Bank warns that some of the traditional mechanisms of monetary policy are not working as effectively as in normal times and will lose their power if interest rates get closer to zero. It indicates that if inflation shows signs of falling too low, it will use its Asset Purchase Facility (APF) to help achieve the inflation target. Currently, the APF (a £50bn fund financed by sales of government securities) is being used to buy up high quality assets and reduce the rates of interest on them. However, the Bank will not hesitate from looking to boost the money supply by creating central bank reserves and using these to buy up the high quality assets in effect printing money."