Is all the 'taper terror' talk that sparked a week-long sell-off in emerging market assets just lost in translation?
Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke has never used the word "taper," noted Randy Kroszner, a former Fed governor and currently a researcher at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
"He doesn't think about it that way. I think he thinks there could be a step down (in its bond-buying program) and then there could be a pause" while deciding whether to go further, Kroszner told CNBC.
(Read more: Emerging markets: dissecting the good from bad)
Kroszner even doubts taper terror was behind the emerging market rout, noting that fundamentals in this asset class have been a concern for a while, especially problems like over-leveraged, bottlenecks in Indonesia and regional policies which are not consistent with sustainable growth.
"Some of the slowdown was occurring already," he said. "This (sell-off) is in some sense adding a little bit of insult to injury for some of these markets, but the fragility was there."