Federal Reserve officials still expect to start pulling back on the central bank's $85 billion-per-month bond-buying program "in coming months," but they engaged in a wide-ranging conversation at their October meeting about ways to reinforce their plans to keep short-term interest rates low for a long time after the program ends.
Officials "generally expected that the data would prove consistent with the [Fed's] outlook for ongoing improvement in labor market conditions and would thus warrant trimming the pace of purchases in coming months," minutes from the Fed's Oct. 29-30 meeting said. The minutes were released Wednesday after the customary three-week lag.
Officials also looked at different scenarios that could differ from their expectations for how the economy or the bond-buying program will evolve. One scenario they considered was if officials decided they needed to rollback the program before it had fully achieved its goals because they perceived its costs had started to outweigh the benefits.