| Notes |
"The initiative to support new consumer and business lending announced by Secretary Geithner was the Term Asset-Backed Securities Lending Facility (TALF) under development since the fall of 2008 - Steven Shafran, the brilliant Treasury official who had come up with the idea, stayed on into the new administration to get the program up and running. The TALF was designed to restore the flow of securitized lending for auto purchases, student loans, business equipment, and other activities in which individual loans were packaged together into securities that were then sold to investors. This lending had fallen off sharply since the crisis manifested in August 2007. TALF was a complement to the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing program in the sense that the Fed purchases of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities were meant to push down overall long-term interest rates while TALF was aimed at specific market strains." |