2019-06-13cnbc.com

He continued: "Are recessions really avoidable or merely postponable? And if the latter, is it better for them to occur naturally or be postponed unnaturally? Might efforts to postpone them create undue faith in the power and intentions of the Fed, and thus return of moral hazard? And if the Fed wards off a series of little recessions, mightn't that just mean that, when the ability to keep doing so reaches its limit, the one that finally arrives will be a doozy? "

Such skepticism comes in stark contrast to the confidence exuded by the likes of venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya. An early Facebook stakeholder and investing presence across several industries, Palihapitiya told CNBC at the time that entities like the Fed have used tools like quantitative easing to orchestrate a pacified economy.

"I don't see a world in which we have any form of meaningful contraction nor any form of meaningful expansion," he told CNBC in April. "We have completely taken away the toolkit of how normal economies should work when we started with QE. I mean, the odds that there's a recession anymore in any Western country of the world is almost next to impossible now, save a complete financial externality that we can't forecast."



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