An excerpt:
There is currently no campus leadership at your school.
That is so true.
One of the traditional roles for the government is to be the "lender of last resort". In the US this is one of the Federal Reserve's responsibilities.
I realized tonight that the government is also the borrower of last resort, though that's a less frequently filled role than the lender's.
It works like this: when nominal interest rates are as low as they can go (zero) but real interest rates are positive, i.e., when there is deflation, then people who have capital can get a nice return by lending it instead of using it (e.g., by buying machinery or whatever). So they do: there's lots of capital available for borrowing, but nobody willing or able to borrow it. Interest rates should drop, but they can't because they've already hit the hard floor - zero. This is what Paul Krugman calls a liquidity trap, I think.
Anyway, in this situation the government can borrow money by selling bonds and spend it on wasteful projects (like paying people to dig ditches and fill them up, or building Hoover Dam), thus helping to get the economy moving again. This was the theory during the Great Depression. So: borrower of last resort.