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I guess I’m not the only one with the willies over how procyclical the financial system has become.  In an interview surrounding his new book, Paul Volcker has sharply departed from current conventional central-bank wisdom, pointing importantly to the potent risk cocktail now mixing a decade of quantitative easing with the top of the business cycle and a sharp increase in market risk-taking.  He’s also argued that the U.S. is now a “plutocracy.”  He’s right – U.S. income and wealth inequality has hit new highs.  And, when inequality is as bad it is, it exacerbates the risk of financial crises.  Could our boom expire in a gentle, gradual way?  Or, as Mr. Volcker fears, will markets restructured by a decade of central-bank and regulatory actions into arbitraging and yield-chasing run for cover if they take fright?  And, if they do, how fast does this rout turn into another systemic crisis given that America is even less equal now than it was in 2007?

Mr. Volcker is almost alone among current and former regulators in his prescient grasp of the ways post-crisis policy fires up procyclicality in concert with ever-worse economic inequality.  As we noted in our assessment earlier this week of the FSB’s forward-looking work plan, global central bankers and regulators are totally pleased with themselves about the bastion into which they’ve made the world’s biggest banks by dint of all the post-crisis standards.  They’ve been worrying for years that costly bank rules realign finance into a “shadow-bank” …

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