A trillion here, 500 billion there – it seems no amount is too much when the authorities want to fix a perforated economy. Keeping an economy on life support through extensive intervention has been the typical reaction to a crisis since elements of Keynesianism were applied for the first time during the Great Depression . Yet such Keynesian initiatives cannot be enacted without “ big bank and big government” ( Minsky ); in other words, a reactive central bank and interventionist government.