one American journalist put it, the Fed’s proposal “ran up against a strong effort,” on the part of the ECB, “to pin the Great Panic on the United States.” The ECB’s reply to the Fed was blunt: “[I]t’s a dollar problem. It’s your problem.”22 As Bernanke was later to remark, the ECB “had some difficulty coming to the realization that Europe would be under a great deal of stress and was not going to be decoupled from the United States.”23 With regard to the swap lines, that attitude did not last much beyond 2007.
