These were not bailouts but money market transactions, of the type that central banks routinely conduct to tighten and ease financial conditions, but now on a scale never seen before. As they lent cash or cash equivalents against collateral—good and bad—the balance sheets of all the major central banks began to expand. Potentially, at least, this could be done without limit within a closed national economy, or a large currency zone like that of the euro or the dollar. But what such operations could not conjure up was liquidity in foreign currencies.
