Kim Kardashian Triggers Massive Sell-Off On Wall Street

The Dow dropped nearly 400 points today, driven down in no small part thanks to Wall Street's reaction to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's "Operation Twist," aka "The Kardashian." The plan is a complicated financial maneuver in which the Fed will move money out of short-term securities and into long-term holdings. Those longer-dated bonds are frequently called "the back end." The plan--nicknamed "Operation Twist" by analysts--gained popularity within the Fed, but is widely despised in the financial community. Mutual fund manager Oliver Pursche calls it "The Kardashian." Here's why.

• "The idea came from seeing my wife read a magazine article about Kim Kardashian," Pursche says. "She's inexplicably popular, fairly useless and all about the back end. And that sums up Operation Twist pretty well."

  

  (REUTERS/Danny Moloshok)