The stock markets have become, especially over the last few years, a favorite target of the monetary policies of the central banks. The goal is clear: the cheap money has to cause stock prices to rise, a phenomenon which will lead to the amplification of the "wealth effect", necessary for the beginning of a new period of optimism for consumers.

But most of the small shareholders, who can't handle the increasingly overt manipulations of the markets, amid the absolute domination of algorithmic trading, have yet to feel this effect.

Even under these circumstances, the stock markets in the developed economies, dependent on cheap money, have suddenly lost their optimism, as there is an increasing number of signs that the central banks have lost control of the cost of financing.

Solutions were immediately found in the United States. The structure of the Dow Jones index was recently changed, by removing the stocks of Alcoa, Hewlett-Packard and Bank of America from the index and the introduction of the shares of Goldman Sachs, Visa and Nike. Thus, it has come to the point where the Dow Jones Industrial Average has almost nothing to do with the "industrial" part of its name.

Will such a makeover be enough to allow the growth trend that the Federal Reserve is seeking? Apparently not. It would seem that a new "dissident" has appeared in the upper ranks of the U.S. central bank, namely John C. Williams, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, who recently admitted that "undesirable results of monetary policies can take the form of speculative bubbles".

He said, in a press conference organized by the National Association for Business Economics, that "the booms and the crashes of the prices of financial assets distort the course of the economy and leave behind them economic ruins ".

Referring to the manner of action of the centra