We are now knee deep in that much dreaded withdrawal phase that all addicts go through, and as someone in the throes of my own personal battle to fully get over sugar, it's a bitter period. While the focus is an emerging-market crisis, one where all the sins of the developing world are held aloft as what not to do, in reality everything is being repriced and even those unicorns in Silicon Valley are not immune. For the past decade, the value of all assets has been superficially boosted by the markets' addiction to the sugary highs of the US Federal Reserve's cheap-dollar policy. It's a policy, it can be argued, that saved the world from a much deeper economic crisis a decade ago when the financial crisis in the US banking system threatened the future of capitalism itself. There's still much argument over its long-term merits, but what's clear is that it cushioned the fallout from the 2008 global recession. Money, and more specifically dollars, flowed and from that liquidity the valu...

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