After eleven years of nearly uninterrupted advancement, the record-long, QE-spawned bull market is on life support, facing the effects of pandemic lockdown and a massively leveraged global financial system. The sheer scale of the equities super-rally (larger than the dotcom and housing bubbles combined) is dwarfed by the magnitude of the monetary policy experimentation that was its foundation (Figure 1).

Figure 1: S&P 500 and Fed Balance Sheet, January 1995–April 2020

“Unfortunately, no one listens to economists.”

~Gustave de Molinari(1852)

I have written some short essays on the following topics. The idea is to dip into the past to see what I can find that is relevant to things that are going on today.

What typifies the phenomenon of the boom-bust cycle is that it is recurrent. What is the reason for this? 

Loose monetary policies set the platform for various activities that would not emerge without the easy monetary stance. What loose monetary policy does here is to engineer the transfer of real savings from wealth generating activities to artificially stimulated activities, which we can label as bubble activities.

Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article.

Forget performing William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The real art form is politicking. They sport taxpayer-funded windbreakers, speak with authority and urgency, and lead a brigade of specialists.

Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article.

In my lifetime, I never have seen anything dominate news coverage like the COVID-19 virus and how federal, state, and local governments have dealt with the death, illness, and uncertainty it has created. That is a lifetime that has included the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War, the moon landing, Watergate, and the 9/11 attacks.