FRANKFURTWASHINGTON, March 19 Reuters Top central banks, faced with the risk of a fastmoving loss of confidence in the stability of the financial system, moved on Sunday to bolster the flow of cash around the world.

In coordination with central banks elsewhere, the U.S. Federal Reserve offered daily currency swaps to ensure banks in Canada, Britain, Japan, Switzerland and the euro zone would have the dollars needed to operate.

The change announced Sunday is a modest expansion of an existing program in which the Fed each week pays dollars to other major central banks in exchange for local currency. By doing so, the Fed, in effect offers lowrisk shortterm loans that ensure the world39;s major economies have adequate supply of the global reserve currency to meet local demands.

But the coordinated action on Sunday still struck a symbolic chord, echoing steps taken to offset the impact of the COVID19 pandemic in 2020. It was perhaps even more analogous to efforts undergird the system after the U.S. housing market collapsed and stoked a global financial crisis and U.S. recession from 2007 to 2009.

The daily swaps, beginning Monday and extending until at least the end of April, will serve as an important liquidity backstop to ease strains in global funding markets, thereby helping to mitigate the effects of such strains on the supply of credit to households and businesses, the Fed said in a statement.

The central bank swap lines have shown little sign of crisis so far, with…