““When members of Congress asked about the swaps, Bernanke emphasized that the European banks benefiting from the program also made loans in the United States, so the action could be seen as benefiting the U.S. economy directly. But more fundamentally, he was convinced that the world financial system was so deeply interconnected that Europe’s fortunes were the United States’ fortunes too. “In a way,” a European central banker said later, “we became the thirteenth Federal Reserve district.””
