NEW YORK — The largest U.S. financial institutions have enough armor to withstand the turmoil of a major and prolonged national and global recession, the Federal Reserve said Thursday.

The central bank’s annual “stress tests” show that the 33 largest financial institutions — including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo — all hold more capital than at any time since the 2008 financial crisis. They also hold enough capital that, even if faced with billions of dollars in losses from loans as a result of an economic crisis, they would continue to function.

The stress tests were created in the wake of the financial crisis and subsequent Great Recession. The implosion of the housing market led the U.S. into its worse economic downturn since the Great Depression. Several large banks failed or were bought in rescue operations. The losses were so great that U.S. taxpayers had to come to the rescue, at a cost of $700 billion.

To keep that from happening again, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank financial reform laws in 2010. The law mandated the nation’s largest banks simplify their structure, raise more capital, and that the nation’s bank regulators had to routinely monitor and test to make sure banks could withstand even the worst possible outcomes. The stress tests became a mandated annual requirement.

The Fed said that the nation’s 33 largest banks would have $526 billion in loan losses under the most extreme scenario. But even with those losses, all the banks would still hold collectively a high-quality capital ratio of 8.4 percent, well above the 4.5 percent minimum.