The Federal Reserve began winding down its unprecedented efforts to stimulate the economy through quantitative easing Wednesday, capping months of speculation about the timing of the “taper” of its open-ended monthly bond purchases.

The Federal Open Market Committee, the Fed’s monetary policy group, announced in a statement following a two-day meeting that it would cut the size of its monthly purchases of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities by $5 billion each, reducing the total amount from $85 billion to $75 billion. The committee declined to say how quickly it would phase out the rest of the purchases, saying that it “will likely reduce the pace of asset purchases in further measured steps at future meetings.”