Two long years ago, during the 10-year anniversary of America’s 2008 financial crisis, a trio of former policy luminaries — Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner — fretted that the Federal Reserve would be ill-placed to maintain global financial stability if another disaster hit.
After all, the post-2008 reforms seemed to curb the Fed’s legal powers. Worse still, Donald Trump’s “America First” stance appeared at odds with the idea of the Fed helping non-US partners, as it did in 2008.
Now, however, this concern seems almost quaint: as the coronavirus panic has spread, one unexpected policy twist is that the Fed now seems to have more — not less — freedom to break previous conventions, than it did in 2008.