Those individuals might seek to avoid interest charges on new purchases by using debit cards. This incentive is even stronger in  3  See the Federal Reserve Board's Report to the Congress on the Use of Credit Cards by Small Businesses and the Credit Card Market for Small Businesses (May 2010) at htttp://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/reports_other.htm.
We will never know how bad things would have been without that aggressive, coordinated policy response. But as a student of economic history, I can say that all the ingredients of a second Great Depression were present. We’ve managed to avoid that extreme scenario, but the damage wrought by the Great Recession has been brutal nonetheless.