Eight times a year 12 members of the Federal Open Market Committee gather in Washington, and their pronouncements on the state of the U.S. economy are much-awaited and much-studied. That was the case again Tuesday, when the FOMC declared that the pace of the economic recovery "had slowed in recent months." Why did this Fed statement create such whiplash? "The world is filled with a cacophony of statements. Each of them may be right or each may be wrong," said Kenneth Kopecky, chairman of the Fox School of Business' Finance Department and a former senior Federal Reserve economist. "But out of this huge cacophony of noise, [the Fed's] is a respected signal. By and large, it's the only game in town that we can say speaks with a lot of intellectual effort behind it. Not to say it's always right. The world is hard to understand."