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Professor Diamond raised the issue back in 2001. "The analysis presented here suggests that for banks with viable lending relationships, it may be a good policy to recapitalize banks until they are well capitalized," Douglas Diamond, Merton H. Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance, wrote in 2001—seven years before the current financial crisis—in a research paper in Economic Quarterly, published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. "Recapitalizing them only to the point where they are willing to write off loans (stop the evergreen policy) or to the undercapitalized point where they avoid failure only by liquidating the collateral of viable borrowers are both bad policies," he wrote.