But while the benchmark rate is at about the same level it was following the financial crisis, monetary policy conditions are drastically different, said Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer at Bleakley Advisory Group.
A decade ago, the Fed slashed its overnight interest rate to zero during the aftermath of the financial crisis. The central bank also began buying sovereign government bonds and mortgages, a practice called quantitative easing designed to help the financial system by flooding it with money.
“The [Federal Reserve] took its balance sheet from $800 billion to $4.1 trillion in that time,” Boockvar said. “You hate to say that ‘this time is different,’ but the amount of central bank intervention we’ve had is what makes it different.”
What happened since then is the current bull market for stocks, which is the longest on record. It turned 3,453 days old on Wednesday, finally surpassing the length of the previous record run from October 1990 to March 2000. Since March 2009, the S&P 500 has skyrocketed more than 300 percent.
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