Central banks can only delay market price adjustments.
Only days ago, policymakers were executing their responsibility for the economy by fighting one another. Now the battle has been joined with securities traders in central banks’ effort to stamp out a combustion of market panic. The firefighting is unlikely to be any more effective than the infighting.
International financial markets have been upended by three sweeping shifts in just a few weeks. The first is in stock markets, which have been sliding fast. The S&P500 has fallen on eight of the past nine trading days, losing almost one-10th of its value in the process. Europe looks no better: the FTSE100 is down by almost seven and the DAX by 11 per cent since the beginning of the month.