The Central Bank of Japan is again intervening in the market to combat the effects of the coronavirus. The BoJ offers banks another four trillion yen (approximately 34 billion EUR) in liquidity and is expanding its bond purchase program by 1.3 trillion JPY, the Tokyo-based regulator announced on Thursday.

If necessary, the bank would act flexibly to keep the economy from collapsing and to stabilize financial markets. Just two days ago, the Central Bank of Japan responded with other measures to address the economic turmoil caused by the coronavirus crisis.

The BoJ has been guiding the yield on the 10-year government bond, the benchmark of long-term interest rates, at around zero percent. The yields rose as far as 0.070% the previous day as expectations grew that stimulus planned by the government to mitigate impacts of the virus crisis would lead to a sharp increase in new bond issuance.

The BoJ bought bonds worth 200 billion JPY with one to three years to maturity, 300 billion JPY with three to five years to maturity and 700 billion JPY with five to 10 years to maturity. It also spent 100 billion JPY on bonds that will mature in 10 to 25 years.

In Europe, the European Central Bank (ECB) announced an urgent 750-billion-euro bond buyback program Thursday to curb the economic impact of the pandemic.

“Emergency calls for extraordinary action”, said the ECB President Christine Lagarde. “As part of our mandate, we are determined to use the full potential of our instruments”, she stressed.