http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/marke...z&ocid=U221DHP
And who is responsible for this record level of debt in financial markets, and record level of debt in the real economy? That’s simple: the Federal Reserve and other central banks around the world that pumped trillions of dollars in freshly printed money into the financial system in the years following the 2008 financial crash to pull the global economy out of a deep recession. They did that by buying up government bonds, mortgage-backed securities and, in some places, common stock, in the process artificially propping up the prices of those assets even as they drove down interest rates. While this unprecedented “quantitative easing” probably saved the world from another Great Depression, the central banks never quite got around to sopping up all that money when the crisis had passed, as they originally promised. For to do so would have run the risk of angering investors and politicians by disrupting what became the longest bull market in recent memory.
Instead, they took the easy political course and allowed all that excess liquidity to be used by banks, hedge funds, private equity funds, companies and households to inflate a new round of financial and economic bubbles. And now that a real-world shock to the economy and the financial system has hit in the form of the novel coronavirus, what might have become a short but significant market downturn looks to be turning into a full-blown financial rout.