Currently governments are pumping 180 billion [2] per month into the economic system (ignoring what China is doing, and not yet including fresh BoE stimulus, also not including many smaller asset purchase programs by smaller countries, so it could easily be double or even triple that figure, but let's say 200 billion/month as a wild guess and lower bound, and that's disregarding that some very large parts of the economy, like saudi aramco or the chinese steel industry almost as a whole, are pretty much also government intervention, not "real" private companies), with lots of talk of increasing it. For comparison, company profits for all of the US economy are 410 billion per month [1] (and that's a flawed number that's bigger than it should be). The US economy is about 25% of the world economy.

So given that governments are injecting 12.5% of the worldwide economy by printing money ... unless you were willing to predict 8 years ago that global governments were going to provide this utterly ridiculous level of stimulus, control such a huge portion of total worldwide economic activity in addition to government spending ... you couldn't have seen it coming.

Economic theory works. Issue is, at the moment economic theory is saying that there should be a global trade collapse. There is, but it's impact is masked, because central banks are taking over serious swaths of the economy (by now close to 50% of government bonds, an extremely large market that rivals the global private sector in size).

And of course, it looks a lot like governments fixing the economy has created a feedback loop that requires ever more government control over the economy, and is rapidly increasing (increased from 3% to 12.5% of the global economy in about 6 months, in what very much looks like an exponential increase).

And every month, stopping the collapse requires more money, just like economics theory predicts. Of course, that means for the economy that, barring large scale bankruptcies (which are coming anyway of course), the only data that matters is what governments will do to further disrupt markets.

Accepted economic theory predicts a boom-bust cycle. Every single bust cycle governments worldwide attempt to stop the bust. Every time they try to take control over the market, and every time they use more extreme measures to do so. Every single time they fail, and every time it happens again, they try again. Economic theory will win out, but everybody has to -once again- lose faith in the government first. That's rapidly coming, but not quite here yet. And this means that every time again, everything looks progressively weirder as the bust approaches, and every time again, government interference leads to people questioning economic theory.

Why ? Because the alternative is telling a LOT of people that they're about to lose their jobs, their homes and generally their standard of living. It only tends to be like a 10% worse standard of living for 2-4 years or so (on average), but every time again people refuse to do this. I wouldn't want to be a pensioner in this upcoming cycle though. May God help them, although that was true for past cycles too. Still looking like this one is more serious.

Reality is that today is no different. Governments will lose this battle against the bust part of the cycle just like they've lost this very same battle about 30 times since the Industrial revolution.

[1] http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/corporate-prof...
[2] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-26/global-central-bank...