This is from a note to Henry Ergas on his article, Low interest rates mean more risks for investors:

Another standout column! A centrally-directed free market economy is not the original vision. And I loved your quote from Hume. I don’t know where we are going to go from here, but it is bad news all round. I also have a long-standing fury at low interest rates, but my reasoning goes back to Wicksell. You are right to note how the world has changed and how few people now make the decisions that matter. I do find low interest rates part of the Keynesian insanity since it is supposed to encourage more investment. What gets me is that even the possibility that artificially low interest rates are economically unsound never seems to cross anyone’s mind.

You should read it all, but this is the bit about Hume:

Thanks to interest rates at historic lows, and massive programs of “Quantitative Easing” in the Eurozone and Japan, investors face new, more concentrated, risks. It is no longer millions of consumers, voting with their dollars, who take the decisions that really matter; rather, it is a handful of central bankers.

No doubt, individual consumers are fickle; but their myriad choices, some going one way and others another, have a degree of statistical predictability. Not so those of the “masters of the universe” who will determine just how long the world’s great monetary policy experiment lasts.

As David Hume famously put it, “what depends on a great number, can be accounted for by determinate causes”; but the decisions “of a few persons [must] be ascribed to causes secret and unknown.”