They did things. But they did not immediately try to shore up failing banks or stabilize the money supply, which are both parts of the recipe that we use now.
On a related note, the full crisis only hit last year after the Fed decided to let a major financial firm fail.
I must admit that there are many potential financial disasters that could still hit which would make last year seem minor. I have no clue how the fed plans to unwind the what, half trillion in commercial ARM loans that are under water and set to reset in the next year or two. Obama is incredibly dependent on the Chinese willingness to continue borrowing from the USA. We have a lot of work to do to get debt levels back to reasonable amounts. And I'm not at all sure that the disaster was enough to really scare people into becoming fiscally responsible.
However for the moment people seem convinced that the sky is not falling. There are signs of economic recovery out there. There is even a chance that when the official statistics are done we'll be no longer in a recession. So even if a bigger crisis hit, there would be a good cause to call it a second crisis rather than a continuation of the one last year.
And there would be historical precedent for that. Our current problems come from an asset bubble that was pumped up from attempts to stimulate the monetary supply to head off deflation after the dot com collapse. But people don't think of the recent financial crisis as a continuation of the dot com collapse, despite the connection.
Exactly my point. In the beginning of the great depression, they did things. They didn't try letting things stabilize on their own.