Some refreshingly objective commentary from DB's Jim Reid, on why the Fed's latest "Tapering" distraction is naive at best, and will end in lots of tears at worst:
It would take a very confident and brave Fed to remove stimulus in such an environment in our opinion. That's not to say they won't but given how unpredictable the data has been in this recovery (mostly all to the downside vs forecasts), can they really be sure that nominal activity is going to bounce back as expected in 2014? Would it not be prudent to see some of this materialise first? If they were removing stimulus because of a desire to reduce the risk of asset bubbles then we'd have sympathy but we would argue that maybe the time to do this was around 15 years ago. To start conducting policy in this manner in 2013 after years of rolling bubbles and an extremely high global debt burden is quite dangerous.
Said otherwise, "dangerous" because the world is already nearly two decades past the point of no return. And the recent market swoon on merely the threat that the Fed will "derail" its monetization course from this (black arrow) to this (red dotted arrow)...
... proves that an actual exit by the Fed and the world's central banks is now impossible, and that the "discounting" market as described in Finance 101 textbooks, is now long dead.
Or, said even simpler, the best everyone can do, is stick their heads in the sand and pray to St. Bernanke.