In writing about Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke's pronouncement that "the Fed might begin scaling back, or 'tapering,' its program of purchasing eighty-five billion dollars in bonds every month" in this week's New Yorker, staff writer Nick Paumgarten took the opportunity to employ a very specific sense of the verb jawbone:
Some speculated that Bernanke had misspoken, or that he was jawboning the markets—scaring everyone on purpose, either to cool things down or to demonstrate that he was capable of cooling them down.
Jawbone is a word to use when talking about idle conversation. It's synonyms include chitchat and schmooze. In a political or financial context, however, the type of conversations jawboning refers to are considered idle only by dint of their not being accompanied by direct action. Here, Bernanke was thought to be jawboning because he wasn't actually tapering the Fed's bond-buying program, just hoping to send a message to the markets by threatening to do so.
Later in Paumgarten's piece, he uses jawboning again, this time with a twist.
By the end of last week, several of [Bernanke's] colleagues at the Fed had engaged in some counter-jawboning, to settle the nerves and appease the hogs.
In other words, counter-jawboning appears to mean exactly what jawboning does in non-financial/political spheres: a conversation that accomplishes very little beyond putting its participants at their ease.