Death of Easy Money Creates Financial Upheaval Around the Globe

Cheap money—an incredibly popular and influential feature of finance that led to a surge of wealth, speculative trading and booms in ridiculous investments such as meme stocks and digital images of cartoon monkeys—died suddenly in 2022. It was 14 years old. Cheap money is survived by its estranged relative, expensive money.

The death has been attributed to a surge in consumer inflation that forced central banks around the world to aggressively lift interest rates to the highest levels in a decade and a half. The end of cheap money has been mourned throughout the financial world, most loudly in ...