The "Everything Bubble" that the Fed (and other central banks) have created

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One has to regret Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s seemingly partial diagnosis of our present daunting economic challenge, especially considering his key role in defusing the crisis. In Powell’s view, our economic predicament has nothing to do with the possibility that years of ultra-easy U.S. monetary policy might have contributed to the creation of worldwide asset and credit market bubbles. Rather, he seems to believe that our economic challenge is solely the result of the supply side shock delivered to the economy by the coronavirus pandemic.

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Indeed, Powell believes that the U.S. economy could fully recover by the end of 2021, notwithstanding the very much deeper economic recession that we are now experiencing than in 2008-2009.

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Despite Mr. Powell’s assertions to the contrary, over the past decade the Fed, along with the world’s other major central banks, created a global asset and credit market bubble. They did so by buying a staggering cumulative $10 trillion in low-risk government and private sector bonds with the aim of forcing investors to take on more risk and to stretch for yield. The net result of that policy was the creation of a global equity and housing market boom as well as the major distortion of world credit markets.

One indication of the world equity price bubble was the very high valuation to which the U.S. equity market reached before its large coronavirus-induced correction earlier this year. Measured by the cyclically adjusted price-earnings ratio, before the pandemic's onset U.S. equity valuations reached lofty levels experienced only three times in the past hundred years. Meanwhile, numerous housing markets around the world, including those in several large U.S. cities, had price-to-income ratios that exceeded those reached at the 2006 peak of the earlier housing market bubble.

More troubling yet, the world’s major central banks have distorted global credit markets in a major way, as investors were encouraged to take on excessive risk. One indication of such credit market excess was the more than doubling in the risky U.S. leveraged-loan market to its present level of around $1.3 trillion. Other indications were the approximate doubling over the past decade of lending to the emerging market economies and the very low interest rates at which highly indebted countries like Italy were able to finance themselves.

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