Here is the AP story on Ben Bernanke's speech this morning. The talk was mostly a history of the philosophy and practice of central-bank interventions in times of crisis. Here are the news highlights from the speech:

To date, our liquidity measures appear to have contributed to some improvement in financing markets. The existence of the PDCF seems to have bolstered confidence among primary dealers' counterparties (including the clearing banks, which provide the dealers with critical intra-day secured credit). In addition, conditions in the Treasury repo market, which became very strained around mid-March, have improved substantially. Liquidity is better in several other markets as well. For example, spreads on agency mortgage-backed securities have dropped in recent weeks after reaching very high levels in mid-March, as have spreads between conforming fixed-rate mortgage rates and Treasury rates. Spreads on jumbo mortgage loans have retraced a portion of their earlier large increases, but recent regulatory and legislative changes make it difficult to assess the impact of liquidity measures in that segment of the market. Corporate debt spreads have also declined somewhat from recent highs.

These are welcome signs, of course, but at this stage conditions in financial markets are still far from normal. A number of securitization markets remain moribund, risk spreads--although off their recent peaks--generally remain quite elevated, and pressures in short-term funding markets persist. Spreads of term dollar Libor over comparable-maturity overnight index swap rates have receded some from their recent peaks but remain abnormally high.4 Funding pressures have also been evident in the strong participation at recent TAF auctions even after the recent expansions in auction sizes, and, of late, depository institutions have borrowed significant amounts under the primary credit program for terms of up to 90 days.