Was The Taper Talk A Miscalculation?

There have been quite a few folks attacking Ben Bernanke for misleading the markets about whether the Fed would taper QE3 bond buying:

Economists and market analysts on Thursday blasted Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke after the Fed stunned markets with its unexpected decision to not cut its stimulus.
Bernanke came under fire for having stoked nearly unanimous expectations that the Fed would announce the "taper" of its $85 billion a month bond-buying program after its policy meeting Wednesday.
The decision cost investors who bet on a stimulus cutback hugely, though benefiting many with long positions in global stocks.
Many blamed Bernanke and fellow members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) for having since May repeatedly suggested a September taper of the quantitative easing (QE) program.
University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers called the surprise "the result of a needless miscommunication.
"This whole taper debate is one that should never have happened," he wrote.
After Bernanke first spoke of a stimulus cut in May and June, "taper-talk came to dominate the financial headlines, and a monetary meme was quickly born. The result... was that markets over-reacted," he said.
"Despite Bernanke's effort yesterday in the press conference to paint the FOMC decision as entirely consistent with earlier communication from the FOMC, it was not," said Chris Low at FTN Financial.
"The Fed may have done the right thing for the economy... but the Fed's communications credibility is shredded."

I've got a question, though.  What if the Federal Reserve wanted to get a feeling for where interest rates would go if they did end their bond purchases, and they wanted to see what kind of effects the higher interest rates would have on the real economy?  What better way to find out than to give the market the impression that the bond buying was coming to an end?  What if May to September was an experiment to see what the post-taper world would look like, and whether it was just too soon to stop?  I would say the Fed got a really good idea of how much the mortgage market would slow down, as Calculated Risk's chart shows:

Also:

But the key is the refinance index is down 65% since early May, we will probably see the refinance index back to 2000 levels soon.The second graph shows the MBA mortgage purchase index.  

The 4-week average of the purchase index was generally been trending up over the last year (but down over the last few months), and the 4-week average of the purchase index is up about 3% from a year ago. 

Not only that, but Bernanke and company were able to see that no matter what the economy is doing, Republicans in Congress are crazy enough to blow it up. They've come to realize that there is no chance of fiscal policy moving in the direction where it is a help to the economy and not a major hindrance.

But back to my question.  What if the telegraphing of September tapering was to see what the post-taper world might look like?  How many people got hurt by it?  Mainly just traders and speculators.  Now sure, some folks got hurt by the higher interest rates the last few months, like home buyers and municipalities issuing debt.  But how many more would have been hurt if the Fed just plowed into ending QE3 for good?  If the folks most hurt were the speculators, I'm not losing much sleep.  But it does explain why so many folks on Wall Street felt so betrayed.  I think that Bernanke and company realize much more than our Wall Street fat cats that most people out there are still suffering from the not-so-booming economy, and definitely unlike the folks on Wall Street, the rest of the country is still poorer than they were five years ago.  So, in the end, I think the Fed was right in postponing the taper.  I just wish they could come up with some ways to help out the common folks, and not just the Wall Street assholes.