As Nassim Nicholas Taleb cleverly points out in his book Antifragile, “Small forest fires periodically cleanse the system of the most flammable material, so this does not have the opportunity to accumulate. Systematically preventing forest fires from taking place ‘to be safe’ makes the big one much worse.”16 By continuing to add debt and kick the can down the road, governments and central banks have prevented some of the small fires—in this case, the pain of restructuring. I realize that calling the 2008 crisis and the monetary easing that allowed the economies of the world to escape
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