The meat of the Fed statement is the following:
1) to purchase an additional $40 billion of mortgage-backed securities each month, open-ended; and
2) to keep the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 percent until at least mid-2015.
From my view, these are both small steps towards an ultimate embrace of nominal GDP targeting. Under that framework, rather announcing a specific dollar amount of purchases, they would simply say that they are going to buy treasuries, MBS, etc. until the growth path of nominal GDP is at a certain percentage target (5%, to pick a number). Nevertheless, that is simply a function of semantics - the end game is beginning to get clearer.
