Since early August, Russia has spent nearly $125 billion of its foreign reserves, $57.5 billion of that on backstopping the ruble.
In addition, regulators have unveiled all sorts of programs to backstop the short-term lending markets, money market funds, bank deposits and bank debt.
Those discussions increasingly center on creating a better kind of backstop for mortgage lending, officials said.
"The cash buffers have given us the kind of backstop that we need," he said, Reuters reported.
With the economy struggling, some corporations are starting to tap so-called revolving lines of credit and other forms of backstop financing.
Many analysts assume that even with the end of the government guarantee, the vast majority of the deposits will remain in the banks because the government will continue serving as some sort of backstop for most of the $1.5 trillion.
But she said the federal government "is a kind of backstop, so that if the state does not take responsibility and does not take custody, the federal government will ensure that the person will not be released".
The Fed was not offering any kind of backstop to manufacturing or transportation companies, and if banks were to enter those activities, they would presumably have an unfair advantage.
If you take the threats of global warming as seriously as you say, why not at least pursue some work on this kind of backstop even as work on mitigating emissions continues?
What's needed, clearly, is for Europe — and ultimately that probably means the ECB — to provide for Spain and Italy the kind of backstop countries with their own currencies can provide for themselves.
