The Fed has a power no other entity in the world possesses: the capacity to create dollars out of thin air. It is beginning to use it to try to prevent the coronavirus crisis from also becoming a financial crisis.

In just the last several days, it has deployed that power to pump those dollars into the financial system to combat this freeze, including by buying vast sums of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities, extending “swap lines” to international central banks to ensure dollars are available around the world, and reintroducing programs from the 2008 crisis to prop up short-term corporate borrowing and money market mutual funds. On Friday morning, it expanded its money market fund program to help support lending to state and local governments.

That is a breakneck speed for the typically cautious, deliberative central bank. Programs that in the 2008 crisis were rolled out over the course of many months have been introduced in just a few days.

Yet the Fed still keeps finding itself behind. It is the equivalent of a runner sprinting at top speed but still lagging in the race.

What might catching up to the scale of the crisis really look like?

One answer could be expanding the Fed’s support of corporate borrowing to include more types of companies and more types of debt. Already, the Fed this week reintroduced a crisis-era program to make dollars available to companies that issue “commercial paper,” a form of short-term debt, in conjunction with the Treasury Department.

The Treasury directed money toward that program to protect the Fed from losses caused by bad loans. The same principle could be used more broadly, potentially allowing the Fed to keep borrowing costs from spiking for creditworthy companies because of the liquidity freeze-up.

That would primarily benefit very large companies that have access to the corporate debt market. A bigger challenge is how to support lending to small and midsize businesses.