The scope of the Federal Reserve’s Year 2000 activities includes remediation of all of these processing environments and the supporting telecommunications network, called FEDNET. Our Year 2000 preparations also address our computerized environmental and facilities management systems, such as power, heating and cooling, voice communications, elevators, and vaults.
As risks intensified and new crises emerged, this safety net was continually expanded to where the Federal Reserve, the FDIC and the Treasury were empowered to allocate enormous resources to ensure systemically important institutions didn’t bring down the economy. This process inevitably led to the picking of winners and losers – not through competition and performance, but through bureaucracy.