According to Bloomberg, Federal Reserve Governor Jeremy Stein said in a speech Thursday that the Fed's tapering of mortgage bonds should be more closely linked to economic data, such as the jobless rate.
“My personal preference would be to make future step-downs a completely deterministic function of a labor market indicator, such as the unemployment rate or cumulative payroll growth over some period,” Stein said today in remarks prepared for a speech in Frankfurt, Germany. “For example, one could cut monthly purchases by a set amount for each further 10 basis point decline in the unemployment rate.” Ten basis points equal 0.1 percentage point.
