I want to emphasise, though, that I am not saying the Australian authorities would or should behave in a similar way, but rather that such a response should not be excluded from the potential toolkit. Importantly, if such a policy were to be used, then private shareholders of the troubled institution as well as its managers would need to be held to full account.
The common element in each of these three examples is that the private sector has swung from relatively normal risk preferences to being temporarily very risk averse. In modern financial systems, these swings in risk aversion can be very costly.