|
NEW YORK (AP) - There's no need to wait for a government bailout of the distressed banking system. The Federal Reserve has already begun doing so.
While much of the focus among investors has been on what the Fed will do with short-term interest rates, the central bank quietly began tinkering with its own rules in August to infuse billions of dollars of liquidity into a marketplace paralyzed by the intensifying credit crisis.
That change allowed bank holding companies to potentially gain access to depositor-insured funds that previously had been largely walled off from being used by the companies' riskier broker-dealer units.
|