One likely reason for the widening gulf between rich people and the rest of us is something you’ve probably never heard of: the Fed put. It’s the idea that if stock markets fall by more than about 20%, central banks will ride to the rescue by cutting interest rates and jacking up the money supply via quantitative easing. Widely believed on Wall Street, the logic goes that the world is sitting on such a powder keg of debt that failing to act would incinerate the financial system.

On this rationale, the route to early retirement has simply been to bet the farm on, say, the Nasdaq, and wait until it has done a “ten X”, as traders like to put it. But if you were hoping to join the party, the bad news is that the Fed put may finally be over, according to financial experts Edward Jones and Yener Altunbas. And this, they argue, makes a proper market crash more likely than in a generation.

Elsewhere, we report on the lack of oversight of dangerous biological research that could mean hybrid coronaviruses more aggressive than the existing variants are already being created. And new research sheds light on the ancient evolutionary arms race between moths and bats.

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