But we cannot afford to be complacent. 4  BIS Review 17/2008  Even as we have built up “buffers”, we must continue to be mindful of the potential risks, particularly the possibility of unforeseen ones that could impede our path to further progress.
Alan Blinder and I adapted this general idea to show how, by affecting banks' loanable funds, monetary policy could influence the supply of intermediated credit (Bernanke and Blinder, 1988). Historically, monetary policy did appear to affect the supply of bank loans (at any given level of interest rates).