Are we experiencing a market regime change?
Across the West, sovereign debt levels were last this high eighty years ago; back then the US Dollar replaced Sterling as the primary reserve currency. Inflation was last this high forty years ago; then governments retreated from interfering in their economies. Interest rates were last this high fifteen years ago; then the sub-prime mortgage bubble burst. In all of these cases, change arrived gradually, then suddenly.
The focus these days on interest rates is understandable, but what the US Federal Reserve is doing needs to be understood in the context of the most leveraged American economy in history. The damage that the Fed and its monetary policy experiment (zero interest rates & quantitative easing) has inflicted on the American economy is incalculable.