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. Last 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”. Last week, as well as increasing the size of some of these ongoing programmes, Mr Bernanke went back to the textbooks. The Fed has adopted the reflationary quantitative easing measures deployed in Japan between 2001 and 2006.

In addition to pledging to keep policy interest rates low for a longer period, the central bank will buy up $300bn of longer-term Treasuries. Like most of the Fed's other measures, this move aims to reduce the cost of interest on lending and to prevent deflation with large injections of newly created money into the monetary base.