THE key to maintaining economic stability is well-placed confidence in the markets. Bubbles, by contrast, result from misplaced confidence.

We are living in a post-bubble world, following the stock market bubble of the 1990s and the real estate bubble of the 2000s. That is the backdrop for the current crisis. We need to restore confidence in the markets’ basic ability to function, not in their presumed tendency to make us all rich by always going up.

Some short-term remedies are under way. President Bush has said that fiscal policy is urgently needed to address the current situation and has reached tentative agreement with Congress on a temporary tax cut of $150 billion. This might increase the official federal deficit from about 1 percent of gross domestic product to something like 2 percent, about where it was a couple of years ago. And on Tuesday, the Federal Reserve under its chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, made an emergency between-meetings cut of three-quarters of a percentage point in the federal funds rate. The move brought that benchmark rate down to its level midway into the 2001 recession, and the Fed has signaled that it stands ready to make further cuts.

While a temporary tax cut and interest rate cuts are good ideas, they don’t address the underlying crisis of confidence. If these measures succeed merely in making people consume more, running to the malls and making the already-negative personal saving rate even more negative, they won’t restore faith in the financial markets.