(Reuters) - The Federal Reserve is moving as quickly as possible to set up new emergency lending facilities to support credit markets and the economy, and its efforts are already helping to stabilize short-term funding markets, said Daleep Singh, head of the markets group at the New York Fed.

“The bottom line here is time is of the essence,” Singh said during a moderated discussion organized by the Money Marketeers of New York University. “The speed and the scale of downside pressure on the economy I think we’d all acknowledge is unprecedented in our lifetimes, so we’re doing whatever we can within our mandate to match that speed and scale.”

Singh said his team is running about 15 operations a day and that the Fed turned to vendors to set up some of the emergency lending programs launched recently so that it could move quickly at a time when the market operations handled by staff were already at “record volumes.”