(Bloomberg) -- Sweden’s central bank ramped up its stimulus and pledged to buy corporate bonds in a bid to stop the Nordic economy’s freefall and an alarming jump in joblessness.

The Riksbank, acting sooner than many investors expected to aid growth, added another 200 billion kronor ($21 billion) to its quantitative easing and extended the program until June next year. It said 10 billion kronor will be devoted to corporate bonds, and it also took measures to ease the flow of credit to companies.

“Despite robust economic policy stimulus, the negative consequences of the pandemic are substantial all around the world,” the central bank said in a statement. “The crisis has clear effects on the Swedish economy, too, not least in the form of rapidly rising unemployment. Inflation has fallen tangibly.”

With the economy anticipated by officials to shrink 4.5% this year, the monetary authority led by Governor Stefan Ingves is acting with arguably all the weapons at its disposal other than negative interest rates. The Riksbank has set itself apart from peers by becoming the world’s only central bank to have escaped subzero monetary policy.

Sweden has also stood out for applying possibly Europe’s loosest lockdown to keep the coronavirus at bay, an experiment that has softened the blow to growth. The country has also suffered among the world’s highest per-capita death rates from the disease.

“In Sweden and elsewhere, we expect a short-term bounce will be followed by a period where social distancing keeps a lid on economic activity,” said Johanna Jeansson, an economist at Bloomberg Economics. “Boosting QE is the right thing to do in order to help smooth the transition to a new normal for businesses and households.”

The krona weakened slightly against the euro after the Riksbank’s announcement, and traded at 10.4693 kronor a euro as of 10:24 a.m. in Stockholm.

The decision not to return to a negative monetary policy was applauded by SEB Chief Economist Robert Bergqvist, who suggested the Riksbank should keep its resolve not to return to a negative interest rate. The Riksbank now predicts that its benchmark repo rate will stay at 0% all the way through mid-2023.

In SEB’s poll of fixed-income investors, 90% had expected the Riksbank to announce additional bond purchases this year, though most of them believed it would stay its hand at the July meeting and act later in 2020.

The decision to expand into corporate bond purchases is a new departure for the central bank, which is still working out how to conduct such a policy. It announced on Wednesday that it will keep engaging BlackRock Financial Market Advisory for counsel on that market.

(Updates with forecast in fourth paragraph)

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