Surprised Again!--The Covid Crisis and the New Market Bubble (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781589881655)

"What will not surprise you is the wisdom, wit, and insight that Alex Pollock and Howard Adler bring to this indispensable guide to financial prophecy. The future may be a closed book, but you must open--and read--this one."--James Grant, Grant's Interest Rate Observer

About every ten years, we are surprised by a financial crisis. In 2020, we were Surprised Again! by the financial panic of the spring triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic. Not one of the 30 official systemic risk studies developed in 2019 had even hinted at this financial crisis as a possibility, or at the frightening economic contraction which resulted from the political responses to control the virus. In response came the unprecedented government fiscal and monetary expansions and bailouts. Later 2020 brought a second big surprise: the appearance of an amazing boom in asset prices, including stocks, houses, and cryptocurrencies.

Alex Pollock and Howard Adler lived through this historic instability while serving as senior officials of the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Their book lays out the many elements of the panic and its aftermath, from the massive elastic currency operations which rode to the rescue by financing the bust with unprecedented government debt, to the consequent asset price boom, which included a renewed bubble in house prices financed by government guarantees. It considers key leveraged sectors such as commercial real estate, student loans, pension funds, banks, and the government itself. It reflects on how to understand these events both in retrospect and prospect.