The seeds of the current coronavirus economic contraction were sown during the subprime Panic of 2008. Back then, short sellers (and those who wanted to blame Wall Street) supported an accounting rule, "mark-to-market," that caused market participants - and their accompanying liquidity - to flee for the exits. Instead of fixing that rule, the Federal Reserve instituted quantitative easing while the Treasury invented an alphabet soup of programs that spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to fill a hole growing bigger by the day.
