Well almost everyone. The conventional wisdom right now is that the Fed delayed tapering to fix its miscommunication in its June statement. The argument goes that the Fed should never have mentioned tapering and it was correcting itself by not cutting back its bond-buying. Here’s Bloomberg’s Justin Wolfers:

Chairman Ben Bernanke promised that future quantitative easing would depend on the incoming economic data. Those data clearly have been weaker than most analysts, including the Fed, had hoped. The only way for the Fed to convince markets that its policies are data-dependent is to make data-dependent decisions. Let’s hope this episode has helped rebuild some of the Fed’s credibility.

This whole taper debate is one that should never have happened. It’s the result of a failed communication strategy.

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The point is that “taper off” doesn’t really represent an interesting new policy easing, but rather its main function is to undo the damaging tightening in financial conditions that occurred following the initial taper talk.

Wolfers analyzes the underlying situation correctly, but gets to the wrong conclusion. He says that the Fed is data-dependent and the economy worsened slightly over the three months in between the Fed’s June FOMC statement and its one two days ago. That should lead the market and investors to believe that the Fed would not taper, but it didn’t because none of them truly believed the Fed would adjust its policy based on the data.

The failed communications strategy wasn’t a Fed error. It was a forecaster error. I went back and read through the transcript of Bernanke’s June press conference last night. Every single time he mentioned tapering, he prefaced it by saying something like “if the incoming data support the view that the economy is able to sustain a reasonable cruising speed” or “[i]f the incoming data are broadly consistent with this forecast.” And guess what? The incoming data was NOT broadly consistent with this economic forecast.

This is where Tim Duy and I disagree. He writes:

I think this means that, in general, the data was broadly consistent with the Fed’s expectations.  That is, we weren’t reading the data wrong.  They just decided that they could wait until longer before initiating the taper.

The September FOMC statement did not do a good job of indicating that the data came in slightly below the Fed’s economic forecast. But Bernanke laid it out clearly in his prepared remarks:

in evaluating whether a modest reduction in the pace of asset purchases would be appropriate at this meeting, however, the Committee concluded that the economic data do not yet provide sufficient confirmation of its baseline outlook to warrant such a reduction. Moreover, the Committee has some concern that the rapid tightening of financial conditions in recent months could have the effect of slowing growth, as I noted earlier, a concern that would be exacerbated if conditions tightened further. Finally, the extent of the effects of restrictive fiscal policies remains unclear, and upcoming fiscal debates may involve additional risks to financial markets and to the broader economy. In light of these uncertainties, the Committee decided to await more evidence that the recovery’s progress will be sustained before adjusting the pace of asset purchases.

The Chairman is saying two things here: (1) the rise in interest rates since June have already lead to a tightening in financial conditions and (2) the potential for a government shutdown/default makes the Fed cautious. Overall, the Fed reduced its economic growth forecast slightly. Bernanke is explicitly saying that the financial data is not consistent with their June economic forecast. The Fed is adjusting its policy as the state of the labor market changes.

That’s why I think Duy and other journalists are misreading the data. The job reports have been mediocre at best. The labor force participation rate has declined. Average hourly earnings and average weekly hours have barely budged. The Commerce Department first revised its GDP numbers down from a 2.4% annual rate to one of 1.8% and then revised them back up to 2.5%. Mortgage rates have risen quite a bit.  All of these are indicators of a barely growing economy, one growing slower than the Fed expected in June.

In particular, the rise in mortgage rates happened as a result of the Fed’s June FOMC statement. Slate’s Matt Yglesias writes that “[t]he punchline is that the tightening of financial conditions in recent months was caused by … rumors that the Fed was going to taper.” Except there weren’t any rumors. There was the June statement that explicitly repeated over and over again that the Fed would only taper if economic data was positive. The market read that to mean that the Fed was going to taper no matter what and interest rates rose. Because interest rates rose, the economic data worsened and the Fed followed through on its promise to adjust its policy based on the labor market. If the market had read the Fed correctly and not assumed the taper was coming, rates wouldn’t have risen as much and the Fed’s economic forecast would have been sunnier. That may not have been enough to overshadow the other mediocre economic data, but the market also wouldn’t have completely expected the Fed to scale back its bond-buying. The non-taper wouldn;t have been a shock. The Fed and market would’ve been in sync. Instead, the market’s blind assumption that the Fed wouldn’t react to the data forced the Fed to do just that. Bernanke’s remarks didn’t cause the tightening of financial conditions. The market’s misreading of them did.

Once again, journalists are misreading what the Fed is saying. Bernanke isn’t saying that he regrets mentioning tapering in June. He regrets that the market misread him. That’s what the Fed was trying to correct this week. It was trying to tell the markets that it really is going to listen to the underlying data. It was trying to regain its credibility by precisely adhering to the statement it laid out in June. But, no one is hearing that. Everyone is misreading the Fed yet again.