Tag Archives: taper

Whomever actually coined the term “taper”, using it in the context of Federal Reserve QE for the first time, it wasn’t actually Ben Bernanke. On May 22, 2013, the central bank’s Chairman sat in front of Congressman Kevin Brady and used the phrase “step down in our pace of purchases.” No good, at least from the perspective of a media-driven need for a snappy one-word summary. Taper. Then the tantrum. Except, no, it wasn’t sulking rage over the prospects for fewer...

A momentous day, for sure, but one lost in what would turn out to be a seemingly endless sea of them. October 8, 2008, right in the thick of the world’s first global financial crisis (how could it have been global, surely not subprime mortgages?) the Federal Reserve took center stage; or tried to. Having bungled Lehman, botched AIG, and then surrendered to Treasury which then screwed up TARP, the world’s entire financial edifice was burning down while US...