Fed to taper to $60B this month, Marathon's Richards says

The Federal Reserve will at its next meeting reduce its unprecedented stimulus to as little as $60 billion each month, according to Bruce Richards, chief executive officer and co-founder of New York-based hedge-fund firm Marathon Asset Management LP. The tapering will begin this month with the U.S. central bank reducing its bond purchases to the annual equivalent of about $700 billion, Richards said at the 19th Annual Alpha Hedge West Conference in San Francisco on Monday. “So the tapering isn’t much,” he said. “But there will be another tapering and another tapering and another tapering. And they’ll be done by next summer.” Seventy-one percent of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News predict the Fed will confirm at a meeting in the next two days that it will reduce the $85 billion of monthly bond purchases it has been using to boost the economy. Once the Fed is done with the tapering it will be ready to raise interest rates, which won’t begin until March 2015 at the earliest, according to Richards. “Models say between March and October of 2015, when unemployment goes to 6.5%,” he said of the timing for interest-rate increases. “It’s going to take a while.” Janet Yellen will be a “shoo-in” for confirmation if she is nominated as the next chairman of the Federal Reserve, Richard said. “She will be very dovish for an extended period of time and may taper slower” if she decides to move the benchmark for increasing interest rates to 6% joblessness from 6.5%, or switch to an inflation peg, he said. (Bloomberg News)