You don't say!

The IMF is warning that low interest rates pose a potential threat to global financial stability, and hence to the entire global economy.  In its Global Financial Stability Report, the Fund frets that low interest rates are leading investors to take on greater risks as they search for higher yielding assets.  As a result, it believes that prices "in virtually all the major asset classes are simultaneously stretched".   Consumer prices may not be rising, but then they weren't a decade ago either, when the Greenspan Fed allowed itself to believe that there was no harm in persisting with cheap money policies. We know how that ended up. 

The Fund isn't just waking up to this, of course, but its warnings are definitely becoming a bit more urgent, if not yet panic-stricken.  As a number of central bankers and others have admitted in the last couple of years, it was all very well and good to slash rates and pump money into the system to prevent an outright collapse, but nobody gave any real thought to how all of this would be unwound. There's no sign even now that any of the main central banks has a firm plan.  The Fed has set the ball rolling by halting its QE program, but it's unclear whether Ms Yellen and her colleagues will continue to stay the course if the recent pullback in equity markets becomes more pronounced.

The US, UK and others have been happy over the years to brandish the IMF's advice like a cudgel at countries whose policies they disapproved of. It will be instructive to see whether they will be equally keen to follow its advice, now that they themselves are the ones coming under criticism.