2003 Redux

clipped from www.bloomberg.com Nov. 11 (Bloomberg) -- Imagine you are a central banker. You arrive at the office each morning and scan the daily financial pages and newswires. You read that markets -- stocks, junk bonds, gold, oil -- are positively giddy due to “all the liquidity sloshing around that has to go somewhere,” or something to that effect. That would be the liquidity you created. You may be starting to feel pangs of anxiety before you’ve had that first cup of coffee. You know from your crash course in economic-survival medicine that cleaning up after a burst asset bubble isn’t as easy as it sounds. Surely there’s a better way than orchestrating alternating periods of asset bubbles and busts. “It’s 2003 all over again,” says William White, chairman of the Economic Development and Review Committee at the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development in Paris.