Eight years ago the central banks of the world embarked on a bold experiment. They approached the economic crisis with the assumption that it could be fixed with monetary policy alone. Their primary weapon was quantitative easing (QE).
Now, in 2016, experimental monetary policy has run up against reality. The reason is something simple to understand, and yet hard to believe:

central banks are running out of things to buy.

It's happening all over the world.
In Japan.
In Sweden.
In England.
There simply aren't enough bonds to sell to meet the central bank demand.

In the huge Eurozone the inability to find enough bonds to buy has created a bizarre feedback loop.

The European Central Bank may be buying bonds from itself as it runs out of debt to sate its massive quantitative easing program.

To put that another way, it's virtually the same as taking a dollar out of your left pocket and putting it into your right pocket.

Central bank QE has gotten so extreme that Bank of America's Barnaby Martin calculates "around 45% of the global fixed income market is now “compromised” by central bank buying."
Consider that nearly half of the bond buyers in the world don't care about price, because they print money out of nothing.

This immense, unprecedented, asset buying binge has created distortions in markets all over the globe.
They have managed to push a mind-boggling amount of bonds into negative yield.

The value of negative-yielding bonds swelled to $13.4tn this week, as negative interest rates and central bank bond buying ripple through the debt market.
“It’s surreal,” said Gregory Peters, senior investment officer at Prudential Fixed Income. “It’s clear that central banks are dominating markets. There’s a race to the bottom. Central banks are the main drivers of this, it’s not fundamental.”

The lack of fundamentals is the most alarming point.
It also means, that the markets lack economic fundamentals by definition. It's a condition that prompted the WSJ to say, "One answer to these disparities is that the markets have become so distorted by central bank activity that they are no longer transmitting very useful information about the economy at all."
Say goodbye to "market efficiency". People now mostly trade based on what they think the central banks will do next.

“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”
- John Maynard Keynes

Let's consider for a moment the $13.4 Trillion number.
Already a third of all sovereign debt yields a negative interest rate. That means that investors are effectively paying governments to lend to them.
In spite of global central banks rewriting the rules for the global markets, they've been unable to create sustainable growth or inflation. This has left them trapped.

"The problem is rising debt and monetary easing comes with many collateral effects. One is the distortion of asset prices, leading to asset bubbles," Gallo explained on his website.
"Asset price distortion also has a ripple effect on wealth distribution, increasing inequality by benefitting the already-wealthy who are more likely to hold financial assets. Over time, low rates and QE can also encourage misallocation of resources to leverage-sensitive sectors, including real estate and construction."

With the global credit markets hopelessly distorted, you might think that central bankers would take a moment and contemplate the situation. Instead they are starting to dive into the equity markets, led by Japan again.

Already a top-five owner of 81 companies in Japan’s Nikkei 225 Stock Average, the BOJ is on course to become the No. 1 shareholder in 55 of those firms by the end of next year, according to estimates compiled by Bloomberg from the central bank’s exchange-traded fund holdings.

Once again, instead of being discouraged by Japan's example, the ECB is ready to follow.

The European Central Bank could run out of eligible bonds for its 1.7 trillion euro bond-buying scheme, meaning alternative options are on the table should it decide to loosen policy further to lift growth and inflation across the bloc.
Analysts say these could include large-scale share buying, a policy that the BOJ has already adopted after it started purchasing equity exchange traded funds (ETFs) for its own quantitative easing scheme six years ago.

All the major global central banks are buying up financial assets to the point that global liquidity is drying up. In other words, the central banks are becoming the markets.
Which means that it is unlikely that the central banks will ever be able to sell those assets.

Tiny Switzerland is setting the pace for Europe.

Switzerland’s central bank now owns more publicly-traded shares in Facebook than Mark Zuckerberg, part of a mushrooming stock portfolio that is likely to grow yet further.
It is now the world’s eighth-biggest public investor, data from the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum show....In the last 12 months the SNB’s equity holdings have surged 41 percent to around 127 billion francs, according to Reuters calculations.

Forget the economic questions of this trend.
Has anyone considered the moral and political consequences of having a central bank control basically all the financial assets of a major nation?
Has anyone considered the moral and political consequences of having a central banks control basically all the financial assets of every major nation?
How can this situation NOT lead to a government-corporate partnership in both the economy and the political system on a global scale?
Don't let yourself get distracted with sleight-of-hand arguments and rhetoric. When you buy stocks in a company, your personal interests and the companies interests become entwine. Why should governments buying stocks in companies be any different?
Has anyone really considered the implications here?

"The first stage of fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power"
--Benito Mussolini

As Nicholas Smith, an analyst at CLSA, recently pointed out, the "BOJ is partially nationalizing the Japanese stock market". Not one company, or even one industry, but nationalizing an entire market.
That's a radical step, and its happening all over the globe.

The United States is different though. We haven't nationalized an entire industry.
No one would dream of doing something like that. Right?

Wrong.

The trouble is that, in America, the banks are only part of the picture. There is a huge, parallel structure that exists outside the banks and which creates almost as much credit as they do: the mortgage system. In stark contrast to the banks it is very badly capitalised (see chart 2). It is also barely profitable, largely nationalised and subject to administrative control.
That matters. At $26 trillion America’s housing stock is the largest asset class in the world, worth a little more than the country’s stockmarket. America’s mortgage-finance system, with $11 trillion of debt, is probably the biggest concentration of financial risk to be found anywhere....
The strange path the mortgage machine has taken has implications for ordinary people, as well as for financiers. The supply of mortgages in America has an air of distinctly socialist command-and-control about it. Some 65-80% of all new home loans are repackaged by organs of the state. The structure of these loans, their volume and the risks they entail are controlled not by markets but by administrative fiat.

One week before Lehman Brothers failed, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac failed, an event that most likely pushed Lehman Brothers over the edge. The resulting $189 billion taxpayer bailout is still the largest in American history. No executive at Fannie and Freddie was punished.
Yet eight years later Fannie and Freddie still dominate the mortgage market, still unreformed. Why is that?

The GSEs themselves have not demonstrated any serious interest in significant reforms. They continue to impose guarantee fees and price adjustments far in excess of real credit risk. Since profits go straight to the Treasury, the GSEs have no incentive to control costs. To the contrary, expenses have increased by more than $1.1 billion, or 36 percent, since 2012.

On the other side of the coin, the government is fully aware that it is in the mortgage business, and thus will do whatever it takes to make sure the real estate market stays afloat.

No one is keen to make transparent the subsidies and dangers involved, the risks of which are in effect borne by taxpayers. But an analysis by The Economist suggests that the subsidy for housing debt is running at about $150 billion a year, or roughly 1% of GDP. A crisis as bad as last time would cost taxpayers 2-4% of GDP, not far off the bail-out of the banks in 2008-12.

Of course this isn't the only way that public-private/government-corporate partnerships are happening.
The oldest and most popular method is the sovereign wealth fund. On a global scale they control well over $7 Trillion in assets and have access to $20 Trillion more.
Many of these funds are under control of their central banks.

What we are witnessing is what The Economist called The rise of state capitalism. Also known in many circles as crony capitalism.

And everywhere state capitalism favours well-connected insiders over innovative outsiders.

The Economist only criticizes the economics of the system. My concern is the politics of the system.
What happens if the public opposes and protests the system? More importantly, what happens when the system starts to break down, like it is now? What interests of the public will the governments sacrifice to protect their fiefdoms?