Greater investor confidence in turn allowed the banks to  1  For more on the SCAP, see Ben S. Bernanke (2009), “The Supervisory Capital Assessment Program”, speech delivered at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta 2009 Financial Markets Conference, Jekyll Island, Ga., May 11; Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (2009), “Federal Reserve, OCC, and FDIC release results of the Supervisory Capital Assessment Program”, press release, May 7; and Daniel K. Tarullo (2010), “Lessons from the Crisis Stress Tests”, speech delivered at the Federal Reserve Board International Research Forum on Monetary Policy, Washington, March 26.
2  BIS Review 49/2010  raise substantial amounts of new equity capital and, in many cases, to repay government capital. The Federal Reserve and other bank regulators continue to encourage the banks to build up their capital, ensure that they have adequate liquidity, improve their risk management, and restructure their employee compensation programs to better align risk and reward.