The tragedy of our times, unfolding slowly be surely via ever-lower bond yields, is that there is a vacuum at the heart of the political process where bold action – not least to grasp the debt nettle – should reside.  Since nature abhors the vacuum, central bankers have filled it.  They say that to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  To a central banker facing the prospect of outright deflation, the answer to everything is the printing of ex malign money and the manipulation of financial asset prices.  The by-product of these malign trends is that it makes rational investment and asset allocation, indeed more narrowly the pursuit of real capital preservation, impossible.  

David Fuller's view

Here is Tim Price's Letter.

Central bankers are a soft target, not least because they generally shun the limelight.  However, they did provide some welcome liquidity at a time of massive deleveraging by investment banks and other corporations, and also the public.  Where these institutions could not clear their balance sheets of what was little more than toxic waste, the central banks stepped in to unlock the system by hoovering it up.  I think circumstances would have been much worse if they had not done so. 

The subsequent problem, which remains today, is that national governments from the EU to the USA have provided little in terms of what could be described as sound economic governance in reviving their economies.  Central banks can only do so much.