There is also the US Federal Reserve’s announcement that, if the economy progresses as expected, the last bond purchase from the round of quantitative easing that it began in September 2012 will be in the month after the Federal Open Market Committee’s October 2014 meeting. That kind of news story seems also to affect observers’ thinking, though it is not really much in the way of news, given that everyone has known that the Fed would end the program before long.