In fact, the Fed was established as a result of the Panic of 1907 and the discount mechanism and rate were the only tools of monetary policy given to the Fed in the Federal Reserve Act.
As the storm gathered during 2008, the Fed aggressively eased monetary policy by using such open market operations (supplemented by discountrate reductions) to drive short-term interest rates to near-zero levels.
The big exceptions are Taiwan, where the discountrate is less than 1.9%, and Singapore, which carries out monetary policy by setting a path for the exchange rate, not the interest rate.