According to Desmond Lachman, a former deputy director of the IMF’s policy and review office and former economist at Salomon Smith Barney,
the U.S. investment market has become “an ‘everything’ asset and credit bubble that is very much larger and more pervasive than in the earlier housing and credit market,” the collapse of which set off the Great Recession in 2006.
Lachman made his comments in a 15 March essay in The National Interest.
“It is not simply that U.S. equity valuations are at the lofty levels last experienced on the eve of the 1929 stock market crash,” he said, “nor is it that the dubious Bitcoin market now has a valuation over $1 trillion.
“It is also those very risky borrowers, especially in the highly leveraged loan market and in emerging-market economies, can raise money at interest rates not much higher than those at which the U.S. government can borrow.
“When the pleasant easy money music stops and interest rates start to rise… past experience would suggest that… bubbles will start bursting,” he wrote.
“Policymakers have no excuse for not anticipating the real risk” that when the bubble bursts, it “could wreak havoc on the global economy,” Lachman concluded.
In “Waiting for the Last Dance,” a January 2021 essay published on the Grantham, Mayo, and van Otterloo investment company website, renowned British investment manager Jeremy Grantham wrote:
“The long bull market since 2009 has finally matured into a fully-fledged epic bubble, featuring extreme overvaluation, explosive price increases, frenzied issuance, and hysterically speculative investor behavior… this event will be recorded as one of the great bubbles of financial history.”
The symptoms of market frenzy include the growing number of amateur investors, sudden mass interest in obscure companies such as GameStop, and me-too market fads such as buying Tesla shares, according to Martin Wolf in a 16 March Financial Times essay.
Because not only stock markets but the entire global financial system now rests on cheap money doled out by central banks, when the bubble pops, it could trigger a “debt crisis that damages institutions, freezes markets, and creates mass bankruptcies,” Wolf warned.
Cheap-money policies of the U.S. Federal Reserve and other central banks kept markets functioning during 2020’s crisis, but “the financial system remains vulnerable to another liquidity strain, as the underlying structures and mechanisms that gave rise to the turmoil are still in place,” according to a recent review by the intergovernmental Financial Stability Board, chaired by Fed vice-chair Randal Quarles.
TRENDPOST: We note this FT article and the facts stated since we reiterate what we have been forecasting since the COVID War began over a year ago: the entire market is a gambler’s house of cards charade that will collapse.
