“The End of the World is Just the Beginning”
LONDON, Dec 1 (Reuters Breakingviews) - “Our earth is degenerate in these latter days: bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book, and the end of the world is evidently approaching.” These words were inscribed on an Assyrian tablet nearly 5,000 years ago.
Doom-mongering is once again back in fashion.
There’s even a vogueish new term, “polycrisis”, to describe the multiple threats confronting economic prosperity and modern civilisation.
My own contribution to the burgeoning crisis literature, “The Price of Time”, argues that ultralow interest rates in the years after the 2008 global financial crisis inflated a number of asset price bubbles and contributed to the buildup of leverage, widespread misallocation of capital and undue risk-taking.
The ensuing systemic fragility makes it extraordinarily difficult for central bankers to return interest rates to historically normal levels without crashing the economic system.
Peter Zeihan has other concerns. In his wittily titled “The End of the World is Just the Beginning”, the geopolitical strategist suggests that a number of countries from Germany to China face insuperable demographic challenges.
Edward Chancellor
Bernanke and Edward Chancellor offer conflicting perspectives on the crisis in central banking
Behind each of them stands a different guru. For Bernanke, it is John Maynard Keynes.
Chancellor His guru is Friedrich Hayek
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