Ben Bernanke is playing his part. The chairman of the Federal Reserve is making sure that monetary policy is doing all it can to stem the crisis. This week, he announced that the US would begin old-fashioned Japanese-style quantitative easing. The Fed, however, will need help from the rest of the US government. The current financial and stimulus packages are not yet up to the task.

As the crisis has deepened, the Fed aggressively loosened conventional monetary policy, expanded the monetary base, provided large-scale liquidity support and backed lending directly with “credit easing”. This week, as well as increasing the size of some of these ongoing programmes, Mr Bernanke adopted the reflationary quantitative easing measures deployed in Japan between 2001 and 2006.