It was always going to be a tough ask. How to remove all that stimulus, all those trillions of freshly minted dollars in emergency money from an economy, without causing conniptions on financial markets? The shake-out on global stock markets is long overdue. Despite an economy struggling to raise itself off the mat, American investors pushed Wall Street to record levels in 2013 and then doggedly higher, thanks to radical steps by the US Federal Reserve. Not only did it cut interest rates to zero, to ward off the worst effects of the global financial crisis, it engaged in three long bouts of money printing, pumping ... (full story)