Notably, we led the development of stress-testing large banking organizations’ capital adequacy. The first stress tests, in 2009, and the public disclosure of their results made it possible for large U.S. banks to once again attract private capital.
The antithesis of such rule-like behavior, of course, is discretion; that is, policymaking conducted period by period with great latitude to take whatever actions seem best at the time. The rules-versus-discretion debate in economics is an old one, dating back at least to Henry Simons in 1936.