The Daily Feather — β-block & Tackle
There was more than flower power propelling the 1960s. In 1958, Sir James Black became intrigued that a derivative of the β-adrenoceptor-selective agonist isoprenaline, dichloroisoprenaline, lowered heart rates. After several setbacks, in the mid-1960s, the Scottish pharmacologist unveiled propranolol. The advent of β-blockers was a watershed for people with bad tickers. Considered one of the most important medical advances of the 20th century, per Harvard, “The job of beta receptors is to latch onto chemical messengers released by the nervous system. In response to these messengers, the heart beats faster, blood vessels constrict, the airways relax, and the kidneys increase production of a protein that boosts blood pressure. Beta-blockers subvert these processes by settling onto beta receptors and preventing the chemical messengers from binding to their receptors.” The result for countless masses whose lives have been saved is lowered blood pressure, protection against recurrent heart attacks, and extended lives for those with heart failure. As a bonus, β-blockers treat glaucoma, anxiety, and migraines. Sir Black’s 1988 Nobel Prize was well deserved.
The same cannot be said of Ben Bernanke. As Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell warned him on October 24, 2012, “We look like we are blowing a fixed-income duration bubble right across the credit spectrum that will result in big losses when rates come up down the road. You can almost say that that is our strategy.” He went on to caution that when the time came, they would encounter “the problems of exiting from a near $4 trillion balance sheet.” Tack on an additional $4.5 trillion to that problematically high figure and the challenge is exponentially more forbidding. The irony, of course, is Powell’s post-pandemic panic is what got the Fed to the point of Impossible Extrication.