Did This Straw Break the Finance Sector’s Back? T. Sabri Oncu

I will define the straw and start with quoting from my July 2017 H T Parekh Finance Column titled “Debts That  Cannot Be Paid Will Not Be” (Öncü 2017). With my June 2015 H T Parekh Finance Column article titled “When Will the Next Financial Crisis Start?” [Öncü 2015a] I initiated an investigation of the possibility of a new phase
in the ongoing global financial crisis (GFC) that started in the summer of 2007. [This article was retitled on the Policy Research in Macroeconomics website as “What Straw Will Break the Finance Sector’s Back?” when it was republished three days later (Öncü 2015b).]

Then followed two more articles, “Has the Crash of the Global Financial Markets Begun?” and “It’s the Private Debt, Stupid!”(Öncü 2016a, 2016b) and my July 2017 article was the fourth in the series.In this fourth article I said: Time will tell whether this article will be the last in the series or not as fi nancial markets have a way to put even the best forecasters to shame. (Öncü 2017) Now is the time for a fi fth article in the series, and who knows when the sixth article will come?

Bubbles Everywhere

I have written about the quantitative easing programmes (QEs) extensively in the EPW (see, for example, Öncü 2016a) so I will not go into details here. To put it briefly, the QEs were essentially about purchases of government bonds through which the involved central banks increased not only the base (central bank) money,
but also an equal amount of broad money (that can buy things in the real economy) to avoid a major deflation.

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(This article was originally published in Economic and Political Weekly on June 25, 2018)