In a bear market, nobody can hear you scream. Equity markets are suffering a crash by stealth with reality nibbling away at asset values. Not long after he slipped into his job, Ben Bernanke, the two-term 14th chair of the US Federal Reserve (2006-2014), called quantitative easing – still a novelty in 2008 – a “great experiment that must be tried.” In the years that followed, the Fed duly flooded the market with an estimated $9 trillion.