Fed Seen Laying Ground for More Large-Scale Asset Purchases

Federal Reserve officials are probably engineering a third round of large-scale asset purchases, while they are unlikely to announce a decision today, according to economists in a Bloomberg News survey.

Sixty-nine percent of those surveyed say Chairman Ben S. Bernanke will embark on a third round of quantitative easing, or QE3, with a plurality of 36 percent predicting the move in the first quarter of next year, according to the poll of 42 economists from Oct. 26-31.