Boom & bust cycles seem to be a built in “feature” of market economies. The architects are not trying to create booms and busts per se, but they are trying to manage them so they aren’t as devastating as 1929.
But they're booming much harder and busting much harder...
Should the fed have stepped in to prevent a flash freeze in liquidity in March 2020? Probably. Did they go way way way too far? Maybe. Did they go way way too far in Aug 2020 and Nov 2020 and Dec 2020 and Jan 2021, etc? Definitely.
Viewing boom-bust cycles as "something that just happens, we have no theory to explain why" is the great failure and embarrassment of mainstream (that is to say Keynesian) economics.
But a comprehensive theory exists. It won Friedrich Hayek the Nobel Prize in 1974. You should at least be familiar with it.
Permanent poverty is built into this economy for all but a very very lucky few. We can do better, and framing the options as market-economy (what we have) and non-market-economy (everything else) is a false dichotomy. Markets can exist without the second-guilded-age capitalism we're in right now.
