Death of Easy Money Creates Financial Upheaval Around the Globe

Cheap money—an incredibly popular and influential feature of finance that led to a surge of wealth, speculative trading and booms in ridiculous investments such as meme stocks and digital images of cartoon monkeys—died suddenly in 2022. It was 14 years old. Cheap money is survived by its estranged relative, expensive money.

The death has been attributed to a surge in consumer inflation that forced central banks around the world to aggressively lift interest rates to the highest levels in a decade and a half. The end of cheap money has been mourned throughout the financial world, most loudly in the US stock market, which saw its worst decline since 2008 amid the disappearance of what had come to be known as the “Fed put”: the belief that the Federal Reserve would always come to the rescue with a more market-friendly policy if stocks tumbled.