To ensure collective responsibility, Bair and Frank insisted that oversight over the entire system should be exercised not by the Treasury and the Fed alone but by a Financial Stability Oversight Council chaired by the Treasury but gathering together all the key regulators. The idea of crisis management by committee appalled Geithner. But the council, in fact, was given many of the powers that he wanted. It would have the right to designate systematically important institutions. Those could be placed under a regime of heightened supervision and regulation including regular stress testing.
