The extraordinary actions of the Federal Reserve on Monday morning can be boiled down to two sentences: There is a rapidly developing shortage of dollars across the economy. And the Fed will do anything it needs to, on any scale imaginable, to end this shortage.

Its announcement was phrased in the dry bureaucratese typical of statements from a central bank. But it contains a powerful idea. The Fed, the one entity in the world with the power to create dollars out of thin air, has every intention of doing so at whatever magnitude is necessary to try to reduce the severity and limit the duration of the coronavirus economic crisis.

“The Federal Reserve is committed to using its full range of tools to support households, businesses and the U.S. economy over all in this challenging time,” the statement begins. Unlike some past grand statements from central bankers promising to do “whatever it takes” to solve a crisis, this one was accompanied with actions matching the scale of the words.

It’s really two distinct crises the Fed is trying to solve, with overlapping tools.

One is an already-underway crisis in which financial markets are breaking down, failing in some of the same ways they did in the 2008 financial crisis — and thus threatening to make the economic crisis worse. The other is the threat of widespread business failures that could create mass bankruptcies, leaving millions of Americans jobless even once the virus is contained.