[Skybird]

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/...about-to-burst

If you believe that central banks are genuinely independent of government, you probably still imagine in middle age that the packages under the Christmas tree when you were a kid were put there by a fat geezer in red felt and not your parents. Keeping interest rates absurdly low while allowing inflation to soar is such a commonplace of monetary deviousness that it has a name: fiscal repression. Heavily indebted governments adore inflation, though politicians will never say so in public; it so magically melts the debt that behind closed doors US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen must be doing a little dance.
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The US has been enjoying its longest bull market in history. The Dow streaked from a low of about 6,500 in 2009 to a peak of 36,799 this January, thereby multiplying in value by between five and six times in 13 years. Are all these companies making that much more stuff? The S&P’s wonky average price-to-earnings ratio — real earnings per share — suggests not. Surging stock prices have become dislocated from piddling (or sometimes nonexistent) real-world profits.
The FTSE has been dumpier, which may make British investors lucky. American investors have been lulled into imagining that markets only go up. But historical perspective can be bracing. The Dow didn’t recover from its 1929 crash for 25 years. The index also stayed basically flat for another 25 years, between 1960 and 1985. The only bull market comparable to today’s lasted nine years in the 1990s, and didn’t that end in tears.
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The whole reason finance employs the metaphor ‘bubbles’ — lately, ‘superbubbles’ — is that they pop. The splatter is never pretty. The Fed and B of E have facilitated wild government spending of inflationary funny money, while forcing small-scale savers to put their precious assets at risk in unpredictable shares.