As I look at the uneven response of our government, there's one major agency that stands above the others for its preparedness and swift action. It has tools at hand that match the scope of what's being asked of it, and it deploys them in a timely manner to mitigate the portion of the crisis that it's responsible for managing. I'm talking about the Federal Reserve. And the Fed been performing so strongly in part because it had the benefit of its own dry run in the form of the last financial crisis. In the heat of that crisis and the aftermath, the Fed developed many of the tools it's using now to contain the economic damage from the coronavirus. We'd be even worse off without it.

Of course, this crisis is mostly outside the Fed's zone of responsibility and so its efforts can only go so far. The Fed can't kill the virus. It also can't stop the severe economic disruptions that come from the extensive shutdowns of business and social activity caused by virus-fighting measures. What the Fed can do, and has done, is to prevent the epidemic from causing a financial crisis, which would in turn cause an additional shock to the economy at large. The Fed's role is to stop the economic damage of the virus from spiraling out of control, and so far it has succeeded.

"The Fed learned a lot of lessons from 2008 and 2009, and I know for a fact from the work they've done inside and outside the building, they haven't just spent the last ten years resting on what they did in 2008 and 2009," says Tony Fratto, a partner at Hamilton Place Strategies and a former spokesperson on economic policy in the George W. Bush administration. "There was a lot of work in that building about how to prepare for the next crisis and what we might do under various situations."

The Fed directly controls interest rates on short-term government debt, but if banks and other market participants are reluctant to lend because the economic outlook is shaky, lower rates won't necessarily flow through as lower costs or credit availability to borrowers. So after the 2008 crisis, in hopes of finding ways to stop something similar from happening in the future, the Fed developed strategies to push down a broader range of interest rates and support the availability of credit in more sectors of the economy. In the last crisis, the Fed started buying long-term government debt and mortgage bonds. Now, in partnership with the Treasury Department, it buys corporate and municipal debt. These direct interventions in diverse parts of the credit markets give the Fed more control over interest rates in more places and therefore more ability to maintain stable financial conditions that help keep the economy healthy. As a result, the Fed has had more juice than you might expect, given the very low interest rates that we entered this crisis with.

"There was certainly a sense that, for the new reality of low interest rates across Western society, the Fed would have to innovate monetary policy, and you're seeing some of the fruits of that thinking," says Mike Konczal, an economic-policy expert at the progressive Roosevelt Institute think tank.