After years of sometimes begrudging acquiescence, markets are getting increasingly cynical.
Apparently it's not just voters who have had it with the powers-that-be, investors are also starting to make their cynicism felt, albeit in trading rooms rather than polling booths.
Two examples of this trend were highlighted this week.
The first was the increasingly stark division between what the US Federal Reserve says it will do and what financial markets believe it will do.
While the median expectation from Fed board members is for another hike this year and three more in each of the next two years, futures prices suggests that there will only be one or two more over the coming three years.
Investors have had a healthy level of scepticism in this regard for quite some time, sure, but this week it looks to have reached a crescendo.
Part of the reason for this absence of faith is that Western central banks have singularly failed to achieve their inflation targets since the GFC.
Standard Life chief economist Jeremy Lawson reckons central bankers have "scored a few own goals" in the post-crisis years.
"The least forgivable of these has arguably been their consistent tendency to overestimate the underlying inflation pressures in economies," he says.
And it's not just the Fed. Sweden's Riksbank, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, our own RBA, the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan have also all had to downgrade overly ambitious inflation forecasts over recent years, Lawson says.
Getting inflation forecasts wrong for so long "has undermined private agents' faith in the ability and intent of central banks to meet their inflation objectives at all," Lawson says.
So far this year there is little evidence to convince investors that central banks are going to get it any more right. Wednesday's weak US inflation data, a continuation of a recent trend, pushed US and Australian bond yields to their lowest points for the year.
Also hitting their lows in 2017 this week were oil prices. Here, too, investors are showing their scepticism, this time in the ability of OPEC to put a floor under the price of crude in the face of the ramping US oil production.
Of course the oil cartel, the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, is not as singularly powerful as the Fed, but it too is seeing its influence over the market challenged.
OPEC and non-OPEC countries late last year agreed to production cuts in order to put a floor, and a few weeks ago agreed to extend those cuts through to March of next year.
Yet the Brent global benchmark fell sharply again this week and has now plunged 13 per cent over the past few weeks to around $US47 a barrel - about the level it was trading when OPEC first announced its cuts a little over seven months ago.
The problem for OPEC is that the rebalancing of the oil market away from oversupply just hasn't been happening.
American shale oil drillers continue to pump more crude and invest in more rigs. The previous assumption was that the bulk of these shale oil producers needed oil somewhere around $US55/barrel to stay viable, but that now is looking more like $US45/bbl, and maybe even less.
An influential oil industry consultant this week told The Australian Financial Review that discussions with his clients suggested US producers were comfortable with oil at $US45 a barrel, and that even at $US40 "half" of them can "manage".
In language that echoed the famous words of ECB president Mario Draghi in mid-2012 at the peak of the euro crisis, the Saudi Energy Minister Khalid Al-Falih in early May said OPEC would do "whatever it takes" to rebalance the global oil market.
But this week the International Energy Agency, which consults on energy trends to governments, took an apparent swipe at OPEC in its monthly report.
Titled Whatever it takes, the IEA's report not only said it now believed the oil glut would continue through the rest of 2017, but, in its first forecasts for 2018, said it expected excess supply to extend into next year, thanks in large part to the "dynamism" of the US shale producers.
"'Whatever it takes' might be the mantra, but the current form of 'whatever' is not having as quick an impact as expected," the IEA said.
Will inflation finally make a meaningful comeback? Can OPEC put a floor under the oil price this year and the next? They are not trivial questions, nor are they unrelated, and at the moment markets are doubtful on both fronts.
But a surprise in either could well make waves in financial markets over the coming months.
