The biggest misdiagnosis is the presumption that the government did not have enough power to avoid the crisis. But the Federal Reserve had the power to avoid the monetary excesses that accelerated the housing boom that went bust in 2007. The New York Fed had the power to stop Citigroup's questionable lending and trading decisions and, with hundreds of regulators on the premises of such large banks, should have had the information to do so. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) could have insisted on reasonable liquidity rules to prevent investment banks from relying so much on short-term borrowing through repurchase agreements to fund long-term investments. And the Treasury working with the Fed had the power to intervene with troubled financial firms, and in fact used this power in a highly discretionary way to create an on-again off-again bailout policy that spooked the markets and led to the panic in the fall of 2008.