/ 4 bis central bankers'speeches has delivered more than $ 500 billion to small businesses to help them weather the storm. community bankers played a crucial role in getting these funds to businesses that needed it, showing once again how essential community banks are to the customers they serve. and in response to feedback we received from a number of community bankers, the fed created the ppp lending facility to alleviate balance - sheet capacity issues for banks that otherwise would not have been able to provide ppp loans to their small - business customers. the ppp was created to help small businesses keep their employees on staff, and the main street lending program is designed to support lending to mid - sized businesses through the recovery. the federal reserve has not engaged in lending directly to businesses before, but it was a step that seemed appropriate considering the breadth and depth of the challenges we face. we continue to solicit feedback and make adjustments to the program based on the suggestions received from bankers and other stakeholders, and we continue to welcome your thoughts and ideas on how we can make main street more effective. i would be interested to visit with those who may already have experience with this new loan program, and i would also be interested to hear about how you plan to use it to meet the needs of your business customers. together, these policy actions have helped stabilize financial markets, boost consumer and business sentiment, and assist millions of households and thousands of businesses harmed by the response to the pandemic. credit markets, which had seized up earlier this year, have resumed functioning. in our other role as a prudential regulator and bank supervisor, the federal reserve took several steps intended to reduce burden on banks and help them focus on the needs of their customers and communities. together, with our fellow federal regulators, we delayed the impact of the cecl accounting standard in our capital rules and temporarily eased the leverage ratio requirement for community banks. we also delayed reporting dates for call reports and other data collections. in addition, to address concerns about real estate appraisal delays, we provided temporary relief from certain appraisal requirements. from a supervisory perspective, beginning in late march the fed paused examinations for most small banks and took steps to lengthen remediation timeframes for outstanding issues. we considered the exam pause an important step to provide bankers time to adjust operations to protect the health of customers and employees, to prioritize the financial needs of their customers and communities, and to play an essential and vital role in implementing critical relief

types of model uncertainty and more likely to be liquid even in times of market stress. thus, this new infrastructure might allow investors gradually to regain confidence in their ability to assess the risk - return tradeoffs inherent in mbs, allowing them to reconsider how those securities may best fit into their overall portfolios. as i mentioned, in principle, mortgage securitizations make good economic sense : by providing access to the broad capital market, securitization allows loan originators to access a wider source of funding than they can obtain directly. in addition, securitization can limit an originator's exposure to prepayment risks associated with interest rate movements, to geographic concentrations of loans, and to credit and funding risks associated with holding mortgages all the way to maturity. effectively, securitization can significantly lower the cost of extending home loans, and some of those cost savings can be passed along to homeowners in the form of lower mortgage rates. it seems clear that the housing government - sponsored enterprises ( or agencies ) played an important role in the development of mortgage securitization in the united states. in large part, the broad appeal of agency mbs can be traced to the explicit guarantee of the securities by the sponsoring agencies. this agency support may have meant that the returns to undertaking a thorough and costly credit analysis of underlying mortgages in agency mbs pools were low, so that task was essentially left to the agencies themselves. indeed, even as agency mbs issuance took off in the 1970s and 1980s, the most basic infrastructure needed to conduct credit analysis on home mortgage pools – comprehensive loan - level data that was broadly accessible in a standardized format – went essentially undeveloped. the paucity and inaccessibility of data about the underlying home loans was, in my opinion, one of the reasons that private - label mbs was able to expand so rapidly in 2005 and 2006 despite a deterioration in underwriting and prospective credit performance. that is not to say that better data would necessarily have led investors to completely sidestep the private - label mbs that have caused them so much difficulty. but i do think it was a significant hindrance that the information needed to infer, in real time, the extent to which subprime and alt - a mortgage underwriting was sliding simply did not exist in a form that allowed the widespread scrutiny or objective analyses needed to bring these risks more clearly into focus. thus, i believe that markets for private