Of course, there are some who argue that the government should stand back and simply let these banks fail – especially since in many cases it was their bad decisions that helped create the crisis in the first place. But whether we like it or not, history has repeatedly shown that when nations do not take early and aggressive action to get credit flowing again, they have crises that last years and years instead of months and months – years of low growth, low job creation, and low investment that cost those nations far more than a course of bold, upfront action. And although there are a lot of Americans who understandably think that government money would be better spent going directly to families and businesses instead of banks – "where's our bailout?," they ask – the truth is that a dollar of capital in a bank can actually result in eight or ten dollars of loans to families and businesses, a multiplier effect that can ultimately lead to a faster pace of economic growth.

Obama’s Remarks on the Economy in April 2009

What happened? We had a decade of low growth, low job creation, and low investment, because the money multiplier is fucking not a real thing that exists. The money multiplier dropped like a rock. The federal reserve doesn't maintain this anymore because it's not fucking real. It's an artifact of the fact that the federal reserve will almost always create reserves to back lending and creating reserves doesn't create lending. Nobody wakes up, compelled to go to the bank and borrow decades of their salary because reserves were created. In case anyone looks at this, they changed how M1 is measured in 2020 and that's why it jumped up, there was no miracle. Of course left wing economists have had this right for many decades.