Is the next big financial crisis overdue?

The economic backdrop looks even more precarious than before the last financial meltdown. We may not have long to wait for the next one.

"There are a number of things you don't want to hear a central banker say," says MoneyWeek contributor Tim Price in a Price Value Partners report. "One of those just popped out of Janet Yellen's mouth." The chair of the US Federal Reserve has just said she doesn't think any more financial crises will occur in her lifetime.

This remark "has to be up there" with Irving Fisher's "deathless observation" just before the 1929 stockmarket crash that equities had reached "what looks like a permanently high plateau". Talk about tempting fate, agrees Randall Forsyth in Barron's, especially since, in central-banking terms, Yellen is a spring chicken. She's only 70, while her predecessors Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker are 91 and 89 respectively.

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Andrew Van Sickle
Editor, MoneyWeek

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.