Investors might take a while to get over their anxiety about the US Federal Reserve's "taper".
But they will.
The winding back of the Fed's monetary stimulus should be good news.
It's happening because the US economy is gaining momentum.
Gross domestic product in the US rose by two per cent in the year through to the third quarter of 2013, rising to 3.3 per cent in the second half of that year.
Just how much momentum it sustained into the year's end we'll know later this week with the release of fourth quarter growth estimates.
However the figures wobble around from quarter to quarter, there's not much doubt that the US economy is on the mend.
And that means the beginning of the end for the historically unprecedented easing of monetary policy by the Fed.
That easing combined two arms of policy.
The conventional arm is a benchmark money market interest rate - fed funds - set at virtually zero for over five years now.
The unconventional arm is a program of massive purchases of financial assets, paid for by equally massive infusions of cash into private bank reserves.
But the return toward normal has begun.
Asset purchases were wound back, or tapered, in January to $US75 billion a month, from $US85 billion previously, and the Fed's policy meeting on Wednesday flagged another cut to $US65 billion.
Every hint of a move towards normalisation has been met with jitters in the world's financial markets, particularly those seen by investors as "risk assets", which are boosted by optimism about global economic growth, or falls in the cost of funding speculative investment, or both.
The fallout for Australia, whose currency and share market are both seen as "risk" assets, was typical.
The Aussie dollar dropped half a US cent in the minutes after the Fed's announcement, early Thursday Australian time, confirming its stimulus would be wound back, or tapered, further.
And Australia's share market, like most in Asia, dropped back, losing 0.8 per cent.
This appears to have been more a reaction to uncertainty about what to do about an unfamiliar situation than an truly rational response.
But the "proper" reaction is not clear cut.
Investors looking for a rationale for their knee-jerk reactions could chose to dump risk assets on the basis that the rising level of US interest rates will raise the cost of funding speculative investment.
Or they could buy risk assets on the basis that if the Fed thinks the US economy is doing better, then that's a good signal for the US sharemarket and therefore share markets around the world.
And that's probably the sounder approach.
The Fed has shown it's strongly committed to growth.
Investors may take a while to get used to the idea that shares and other risk assets might be a good investment because their fundamentals are improving, rather than because it's cheap to fund speculation in them.
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