The Federal Reserve is poised to end its latest program of quantitative tightening, bringing the curtain down on the massive intervention in financial markets it launched in March 2020 at the start of the COVID-19 crisis. The Fed hopes that the markets can stand on their own and that the central bank can return to stimulating and cooling the economy using its traditional interest-rate tool. To counter the economic impact of the pandemic, the Fed embarked on a program of quantitative easing, buying up trillions of dollars' worth of securities to keep long-term interest rates low. As a result, the central bank's ... (full story)