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."