Have the mistakes of the last century been ones of too much intervention or not enough?
By allowing foreclosures to proceed without much intervention, they avoid potentially huge lawsuits by injured security holders.
"It was a big decision to do this much intervention," said Maria L. Fredericks, a book conservator at the Morgan.
But the bigger questions may be how much intervention the central bank's balance sheet can sustain -- and how much help it will get from European governments.
It's a shared commitment — a belief that the risks of too much intervention outweigh those of too little, and a willingness to jointly accept those different risks.
And that may lead to too much intervention too soon.The hope in the financial markets is that the worst of the credit crisis is now past.
In the past, they claim, too much intervention has implied a half empty glass, focusing on what is wrong in localities – crime, poverty, ill-health, poor housing – and is thought to need fixing from outside.
History -- which offers cautions against both too much intervention and too little -- shows that it has been hard for the United States to stay out of the way of the Middle East's periodic eruptions.
The trickier question is whether their role in safeguarding financial stability has been counter-productive; too much intervention to rescue financial markets led to an increase in risk-taking, and thus contributed to the crash of 2007-08.
Right now, smart home devices tend to give you a lot of control but require far too much intervention; as my colleague Natasha Lomas says, an app for everything is not particularly smart or liberating.
