The required degree of transparency might well involve more-detailed types of reporting than for normal, ongoing, lending facilities. Finally, the problem of discount window stigma is real and serious. The intense caution that banks displayed in managing their liquidity beginning in early August 2007 was partly a result of their extreme reluctance to rely on standard discount mechanisms.
Absent such reluctance, conditions in interbank funding markets might have been significantly less stressed, with less contagion to financial markets more generally. Central banks eventually were able to partially circumvent this stigma by designing additional lending facilities for depository institutions; but analyzing the problem, developing these programs, and gathering the evidence to support a conclusion that they were necessary took valuable time.