A new proposal by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision for setting the amount of capital banks must hold against potential losses from interest rate risk uses only a few, very stylized scenarios. A simple monetary policy rule illustrates how the reductions in these forecasts can imply a lower projected path for the policy rate. Estimates show that stimulus distributed through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act had a large positive effect. Analysis suggests that the boom and bust in housing has been a key factor. New research uses a novel term structure model of nominal and real yields to estimate how much the liquidity premium embedded in the prices of these securities have varied over time.