Equally important was the coordinated fiscal stimulus to support consumption and investment when confidence was too low to sustain spending through interest rate cuts alone. Coordination is also required with financial regulation. In the short term monetary policy can and at this time does help ease the process of resolving the financial imbalances that were at the source of the current crisis.
For example, employers have long been able to legally discharge employees at modest cost. But in the early postwar years, profitable large corporations were dissuaded from wholesale job reduction. Contractual inhibitions, to be sure, were then decidedly more prevalent than today, but of far greater importance, our culture in the aftermath of depression frowned on such action.