The taper. Isn’t that a giant nocturnal pig? No, you’re probably thinking of the tapir.  The taper is a kind of monetary policy. It’s the bland, one-word shorthand for the winding down of the biggest financial intervention in history: the U.S. Federal Reserve’s five-year investment of more than $3 trillion (that’s almost the size of the German economy) in bonds to prop up economic growth after the global free fall of 2008. There’s plenty of controversy about whether buying bonds with money conjured from thin air saved the world or has fueled new bubbles. But there’s been none about the perils the Fed faces in slowing the purchases down. To investors and central banks around the world, the taper is much scarier than pigs in the night.   The Taper in the US