Professor Terrence McDonough:

The proposals I am making are very much in the context of the current period. Something similar would have had positive effects on the banking crisis. The banking crisis was not felt uniformly across the world. The South American nations with strong capital controls were relatively unscathed. Nations with strong banking regulation, like Canada, experienced less of a problem. Therefore, I think something like this would have been better than what we had. If, for instance, we had a much larger public banking sector - as they have in North Dakota, for example, strangely enough - we would have been able to weather this a good deal better.