Wall Street banks push back expected end of Fed balance sheet drawdown

Wall Street's biggest banks shifted ahead of last month's Federal Reserve meeting toward predicting the U.S. central bank would end its balance sheet reduction process later this year than previously thought, according to a survey released on Thursday by the New York Fed. Banks, referred to as primary dealers, now believe the process known as quantitative tightening, or QT, will end in the fourth quarter, according to a poll taken ahead of the Fed's Dec. 12-13 policy meeting. In the primary dealer survey done ahead of the policy meeting that ended on Nov. 1, the banks collectively viewed the third quarter as the stopping point for QT.