... shifting the credit risk to another party. Now that we are in a crisis, it is instructive to look back and examine whether there were ample signs of a housing bubble and whether heeding these ... guarantee the senior debt (including promissory notes, commercial paper and inter-bank funding) of all FDIC-insured institutions and their holding companies, as well as deposits in non-interest-bearing ... period of time. The Fed’s total assets back in mid-2007, before the crisis, were mainly constrained by the public’s holdings of cash and depository institutions’ holdings of reserves. Since then,...