Everything bubble significant person Janet Yellen
History
Origin
The term first appeared in 2014, during the chair of Janet Yellen, and reflected her strategy of applying prolonged monetary looseness (e.g. the Yellen put of continual low-interest rates and direct quantitative easing), as a method of boosting near-term economic growth via asset price inflation (a part of modern monetary theory (MMT)).The term came to greater prominence during the subsequent chair of Jerome Powell, initially during Powell's first monetary easing in Q4 2019 (the Powell put), but more substantially during the 2020–2021 coronavirus pandemic, when Powell embraced asset bubbles to combat the financial impact of the pandemic. By early 2021, Powell had created the loosest financial conditions ever recorded, and most US assets were simultaneously at levels of valuation that matched their highest individual levels in economic history. Powell rejected the claim that US assets were definitively in a bubble, invoking the Fed model, to assert that ultra-low yields justified higher asset prices. Powell also rejected criticism that the scale of the asset bubbles had widened US wealth inequality to levels not seen since the 1920s,  on the basis that the asset bubbles would themselves promote job growth, thus reducing the inequality. The contrast between the distress experienced by "Main Street" during the pandemic, and the economic boom experienced by "Wall Street", who had one of their most profitable years in history, was controversial, and earned Powell the title of Wall Street's Dr. Feelgood.Powell was supported by Congress, with speaker Pelosi saying in October 2020, "Well, let me just say that the number, I think, that is staggering is that we have more people unemployed and on unemployment benefits than any time in our country's history.  We know that the Fed is shoring up the markets so that the stock market can do well. I don't complain about that, I want the market to do well."