The real cost of the crisis is not measured by the profit and loss statement of any central bank or by whether or not the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), run by the Treasury Department, made or lost money on its various activities.

Disappointment over the effects of the TARP has already destroyed popular and Congressional support for more public money to recapitalize the banks. So, even those who find the economic logic of arguments for fiscal activism compelling must acknowledge that the politics are not supportive.

But the stress tests and targeted TARP money, the path of least resistance taken, enabled the banks to earn their way back to solvency. However distasteful the uses to which those earnings have been put, they at least prevented the financial system from falling off a cliff.

What if from the women in Africa who cannot sell any food there's no roads, there's no warehouses, there's not even a tarp to pick the food up with what if we give the enabling environment for them to provide the food to feed the hungry children elsewhere?

She had the key ideas that led to the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and she helped get that agency on its feet. But she has also been engaged with all of the other practical details of financial reform for as long as anyone in part due to her experience as chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).