New York Federal Reserve President John Williams addresses a press conference in Zurich, Switzerland, on Sept. 22, 2017.New York Federal Reserve President John Williams on Monday defended the bank’s handling of volatility in money markets last week, saying officials anticipated the liquidity crunch and were successful in easing the markets.
“We were prepared for such an event, acted quickly and appropriately, and our actions were successful,” Williams said in prepared remarks.Williams’s remarks followed a week in which there were unusual bouts of volatility in a typically sleepy part of financial markets. Repo rates returned to more normal levels after the Fed made multiple rounds of repo operations. On Friday, the bank said it would keep pouring tens of billions of dollars a day into the U.S. banking system through early October.