Recently, Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid very astutely pointed out that the current “expansion” of the U.S. economy is on its fifth year—the seventh longest in history.

No one can quite agree as to the specific causes of the 2007–09 recession—and fighting that particular fight isn’t the point of this essay. But we can all more or less agree that global overindebtedness caused a mini-Minsky Moment, whereby borrowers could no longer borrow enough to keep from defaulting on their previous loans. Hence September 2008. Hence the collective global “Ahhh!!!!” moment that we all recall with such sweet and fond nostalgia.

 

To stave off what looked like financial and economic Armageddon, the Treasury Department first under Henry Paulson and then under Timothy Geithner, and the Federal Reserve under Ben Bernanke, basically threw money into the economy: The Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) originally authorized $700 billion to buy up toxic assets, while the Fed created the Maiden Lane vehicles, lowered interest rates to zero (zero interest-rate policy, ZIRP), and simultaneously created money by way of the various iterations of Quantitative Easing (QE).