Some of the measures taken by the Federal Reserve to address this mortgage crisis have not been used since The Great Depression.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_System#cite_note-91

Some of the measures taken by the Federal Reserve to address this mortgage crisis have not been used since The Great Depression.The Federal Reserve gives a brief summary of these new facilities:

As the economy has slowed in the last nine months and credit markets have become unstable, the Federal Reserve has taken a number of steps to help address the situation. These steps have included the use of traditional monetary policy tools at the macroeconomic level as well as measures at the level of specific markets to provide additional liquidity.