And yet, as I have said on countless occasions, drawing on former Dallas Fed board Chairman Herb Kelleher’s love for bourbon, once we had QE3 in place, I considered it unwise to go directly from Wild Turkey to cold turkey for fear of getting the financial equivalent of delirium tremens; indeed, we saw that with the “taper tantrum” the markets threw in May of 2013. So I was an eager proponent of the tapering program the FOMC initiated in January of this year. I want to be clear here. Especially at the beginning of QE3, when the nonsense term “QE infinity” was being broadcast by otherwise responsible analysts, journalists and pundits, rates dipped to lows that helped creditworthy businesses bolster their balance sheets and strengthen their wherewithal for future expansion. Again, even if you were living under a rock, you know that this gift of near-cost-free debt as measured in inflation- and tax-adjusted terms has thus far been used primarily to finance stock buybacks, increase dividends and fatten cash reserves, and recently, finance mergers by the most creditworthy companies. For those with access to capital, it was a gift of free money to speculate with. (One wag – I believe it was me – quipped that there was, indeed, a “positive wealth effect… the wealthy were affected most positively.”) We know that monetary policy acts with long and variable lags.
This has contributed to the development of a deeper and more liquid, efficient, transparent and effective sukuk market. Challenges in the development of the global Islamic capital market While much has been achieved, much remain to be done. Let me turn to some of the challenges and initiatives taken to address them. A vital ingredient for the development of capital markets, including the Islamic capital market, is the creation of a secondary trading platform for the capital market instruments. This will provide investors with the flexibility in managing their liquidity requirements. In this respect, more needs to be done in terms of the creation of a continuous supply of Islamic papers and instruments that would promote the secondary trading of instruments and add greater depth to the market. There also needs to be greater diversity in the type and maturity of the sukuks in the market for Islamic financial institutions and portfolio managers to manage their funds effectively. As part of the efforts to address these issues, the Malaysian government regularly issues sukuk with different maturities in order to create a benchmark yield curve. Since the year 2000, the government has developed an  BIS Review 74/2007  3  auction calendar for both the conventional and sukuk government issues. In 2005, the government commenced issuing shorter term Islamic treasury bills and longer-dated sukuk, with a maturity of 10 years, to further diversify the instruments available to investors.