Charlie Munger defines old school. The ninety-seven-year old is partners with Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway. He’s lived and invested through a few booms and busts in his nearly a century on earth. 

Speaking to the Sohn conference in Sydney, Australia, Munger said “I consider this era an even crazier era than the dotcom era.” Speaking of cryptocurrencies, ““I wish they’d never been invented,” he said. 

Until very recently, the hefty monetary and fiscal relaxation unleashed by governments to stimulate the economic recovery at the onset of the global financial crisis has not had major inflationary repercussions, in particular as the main benchmark has been the benign consumer price inflation, rather than the rapidly growing real-estate and stock-exchange prices. At the same time, the so-called modern monetary theory has grown very popular with both academics and market analysts.

Here we go again it may seem to many. The Fed is preparing us for a policy tightening just when a powerful growth cycle upturn is faltering. Or is it in fact an example of another well-known type of error from Fed history—getting behind the curve of rising inflation? The most plausible answer is that it is neither.

Instead, the huge monetary inflation shock which the Fed has administered so far in this pandemic means that the “normalization steps” now in prospect for 2022 are all but irrelevant to macroeconomic prospects or asset market price trajectories.