Policymakers’ faith in the value of finance was undiminished by its 2008 implosion. Indeed, their reaction to the global financial crisis was to insist that more of each economy’s ‘capital’ should be assigned to private-sector banks, and to support them with an ultra-relaxed monetary policy, in which near-zero interest rates were supplemented by central banks’ buying-up of government or even corporate bonds to keep their prices high. This massively increased the ‘asset’ side of the world’s main central banks.
