Martin Feldstein on The Unfolding Stock-Market Collapse

Robert Wenzel of The Economic Policy Journal sums up economist Martin Feldstein's views on the current stock market correction,

The unfolding stock-market collapse—the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted more than 1,000 points on Monday morning, rebounding later to nearly 600 points down, following several days of decline last week—is the inevitable result of the Federal Reserve’s policies, namely quantitative easing that produced abnormally low interest rates. The decline on Wall Street has spread to every stock market on the globe, many of which were also weakened by their own policies of excessively easy money...

The increase in share prices took the price-earnings ratio of the S&P index to about 30% above its historic average before the market downturn began last week. An alternative measure of the price-earnings ratio that looks at inflation-adjusted earnings over the past decade was even higher, at more than 50% over its historic average.

With virtually no yield available on government bonds and other low-risk fixed-income securities, investors were tempted to climb on the bandwagon of rising share prices. Some sophisticated investors realized that the rapid increase of share prices was a bubble that would end when interest rates returned to normal....

Though the recent decision to start selling was triggered by a variety of events, including the collapse of oil prices world-wide and financial chaos in China, the high price-earnings ratios were enough to make the downturn inevitable. All that was needed was a spark to start the process, just as the increased defaults of subprime mortgages did in 2007.

The excess price of equities was not the only mispricing caused by the Fed’s unconventional monetary policy. As investors reached for yield in a very low-yield environment, they depressed the spreads between Treasury rates and the yields on high-risk bonds and emerging market debt. The prices of commercial real estate have also been pushed to extremely high levels, driving down yields to unsustainably low levels. Banks and other lenders have boosted their short-term earnings by lending to lower-quality buyers and making loans with fewer conditions.

Much of this mispricing will likely unwind in the months ahead...

Here's Fed policy in action since 1985: