The Federal Reserve Asset Bubble Machine. Easy money is driving up the price of stocks, bonds, houses and other assets in a era without historical precedent.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Janet Yellen’s comment last week at the International Monetary Fund headquarters in Washington, D.C., that stock prices are “quite high” hardly captures the frothiness in U.S. financial markets. The Federal Reserve chair’s admission also stopped short of acknowledging the role of free money in inflating the price of stocks—as well as the price of bonds, houses and every other financial asset.

At Morgan Stanley Investment Management, we have analyzed data going back two centuries and found that until the past decade no major central bank had ever before set short-term interest rates at zero, even in periods of deflation.

To critics who warn that pumping trillions of dollars into the economy in a short period is bound to drive up inflation, today’s central bankers point to stagnant consumer prices and say, “Look, Ma, no inflation.” But this ignores the fact that when money is nominally free, strange things happen, and today record-low rates are fueling an unprecedented bout of inflation across asset prices.

The Fed’s defenders quibble that houses are less pricey than in the bubble of 2007, or that stocks are less pricey than in 2000, which misses the difference this time around. In the past 50 years, valuations of U.S. stock prices have been higher than they are now for less than 10% of the time, and similar figures hold for bonds and houses. This kind of synchronized boom has never happened, not even before the last two major meltdowns. My research team’s composite valuation for the three major financial assets in America—stocks, bonds and houses—is currently well above levels reached during the bubbles of 2000 and 2007.

A look at the assests bubble.