This conversation is one of three installments summarizing Lowell Bryan and Richard Rumelt’s reflections on the implications of the financial crisis. This second part focuses on the public-policy response. The first examines the broad managerial implications of the crisis, and the third explores what it means for corporate strategy today.

The government response to the financial crisis and its reverberations in the real economy have been extraordinary. Coordinated central banking interventions, direct injections of government capital into financial institutions, and massive fiscal stimulus are just a few of the actions that have taken place in recent months. The potential impact on business is enormous and still too nascent for anyone to fully comprehend.

In the depths of the crisis, Lowell Bryan, a director in McKinsey’s New York office, and Richard Rumelt, a professor of strategy at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, began reflecting on the tectonic shifts in government policy underway. Bryan’s “Leading through uncertainty” and Rumelt’s “Strategy in a ‘structural break’” appeared on mckinseyquarterly.com last December. In late April of this year, McKinsey’s Allen Webb went back to Bryan and Rumelt and asked them to take further stock of government’s response to the crisis since the fall of 2008. Bryan and Rumelt’s discussion of the economic and business implications of policy changes make useful reading for executives trying to make sense of the rapid shifts taking place in their strategic landscapes.