Hollywood has it girls. Wall Street has it words.
- He’s gotta stop with the bond buying and start to taper.
Taper is the latest it word on Wall Street.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is tonight’s top 10 list. It won’t make Letterman’s top 10 list,
- The taper? About which, I don’t know.
- It was the politics?
- So what is taper?
It’s not a zoo animal (tapir), or a cnn anchor, or a way to wear your jeans (tapered leg). It’s federal reserve chairman Ben Bernanke’s toughest job yet. How does he taper down from historic stimulus? It’s likely the final challenge for this chief.
- He’s already stayed a lot longer than he wanted or he was supposed to.
And he’s done what no Fed chief has done before. Basically, he’s holding a fire hose, spraying $85 billion a month straight into the economy. It can’t go on forever, and the obsession on Wall Street over when it will end is probably the most important driver of the 401K right now. Taper as unlikely Wall Street lingo joins a list that includes quantitative easing, fiscal cliff, sequester, remember tarp, sometimes the jargon sounds Greek to the rest of us.
Speaking of Greece, austerity is the word on the street there, the opposite of Bernanke’s actions. If he were a little rascal, he’d be this guy, throwing money from the window. The dilemma for the Fed: take away the training wheels too soon and the economy could crash, but fail to taper, and this economy may not take flight on its own.
Christine Romans, cnn New York.
