practical finance, were my most frequent companions on the endless conference calls through which we shaped our crisis-fighting strategy." During the crisis Warsh tried to engineer mergers between Citigroup and Goldman Sachs and Wachovia and Goldman Sachs. These efforts failed. On September 20, 2008, he was granted a waiver to deal with his former employer Morgan Stanley. The next day Morgan Stanley was converted into a bank holding company in order to access Federal Reserve loans, in effect saving the firm. According to the Wall Street Journal, "Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Kevin Warsh, a Fed governor and former Morgan Stanley executive, worked in New York to sort out the details with Goldman and Morgan Stanley." The editors summarized the decision-making, "Mr. Warsh was part of former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s inner circle during the worst of the panic. Having worked at Morgan Stanley, he provided crucial insight into the real condition of Wall Street, and well before the panic he told his Fed colleagues that the financial system was vastly undercapitalized. 'I think, most fundamentally, that the business model of investment banks has been threatened, and I suspect the existing business model will not endure through this period,' Mr. Warsh told a Fed meeting on March 18, 2008." Warsh was tasked by Bernanke to help devise a financial reform program to mitigate the risks of future trouble. Bernanke wrote “In late 2008, amid the crisis firefighting, we at the Fed began working on our own proposals for financial reform. I wanted to have a well formulated position before the legislative debates went into high gear. Kevin Warsh led a committee of Board members and Reserve Bank presidents that laid out some key principles. Kevin’s committee considered a more explicitly 'macroprudential' or system-wide, approach to supervision and regulation. Historically, financial oversight had been almost entirely 'microprudential' – focused on the safety and soundness of individual firms, on the theory that if you take care of the trees, the forest will take care of itself. In contrast, the macroprudential approach strives for a forest-and-trees perspective.” Throughout 2008 Warsh predicted that inflation would rise despite financial turbulence and economic weakness: March 2008: "On the inflation front, there is little reason to be confident that inflation will decline. There are reasons to believe that our inflation problems will become more pronounced and, I fear, more persistent."