Certainly, an important part of the resolution of the crisis involved assuring markets and counterparties of the solvency of key financial institutions, and that assurance was provided in significant part by the injection of capital, including public capital, and the issuance of guarantees – measures not available to the Federal Reserve.
In these respects, the Treasury-managed Troubled Asset Relief Program and the FDIC’s Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program played critical roles. As I have noted, the Federal Reserve did help restore confidence in the solvency of the banking system by leading the stress tests of the 19 largest U.S. bank holding companies in the spring of 2009.