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By Michael S. Derby -Some Wall Street analysts now believe the Federal Reserve will pull the plug on its long-running effort to shrink its balance sheet at the end of the month. These central bank watchers believe the ground has shifted for quantitative tightening, or QT, due to mounting money market friction, which could threaten the Fed’s control over the interest rate target it uses to achieve its inflation and employment goals. Stopping the withdrawal of liquidity by QT at the October 28-29 Federal Open Market Committee meeting would help ensure the technical aspects of monetary policy continue to run well, these analysts reckon. “We expect the FOMC to end its securities runoffs at this month’s meeting,” analysts at Wrightson ICAP said in a note over the weekend. While they’re skeptical genuine liquidity tightness has emerged in money markets, some of the recent turbulence in short-term lending “is clearly a sufficient warning sign to justify moving on to the next phase of the Fed’s normalization plan.” Evercore ISI forecasters wrote on Monday “we think the Fed will now signal the end of QT at its October meeting with a view to wrapping up before year-end pressures, although the actual end may come a month or two after the announcement.” Jefferies analysts told clients “we expect that the Fed will completely cease QT at the next meeting at the end of the month,” although the Fed is likely to allow mortgage bonds, which have been very slow to come off its books due to challenging housing market conditions, to expire at the current pace. The shift in sentiment follows market moves last week that saw some key short-term borrowing rates rise as some financial firms unexpectedly tapped the Fed’s Standing Repo Facility, which exists to provide fast cash loans collateralized by bond holdings. Also signaling market friction: A rise in repo borrowing costs and the Secured Overnight Financing Rate, as the federal funds rate, the Fed’s main interest rate target, drifted higher in its current range of between 4% and 4.25%.  That all happened as Fed Chair Jerome Powell in remarks on October 14, said QT might end “in coming months,” even as he echoed other Fed officials who have said recently there remains plenty of liquidity in the financial system. Fed Governor Christopher Waller, who spoke in New York on Thursday, said “we're about at that point” where the financial system has the right amount of liquidity, as measured by banking sector reserves. QT RIP The QT process is designed to remove liquidity from the financial system added during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a bid to provide stimulus and bond market stability the Fed aggressively bought Treasury and mortgage bonds to lower long-term interest rates. Those purchases, kicking off in large size in the spring of 2020, more than doubled total Fed holdings to $9 trillion by the summer of 2022. Since then the Fed has allowed a set amount of bonds to mature and not be replaced, taking holdings to the current level of $6.6 trillion. The Fed has said it seeks to leave enough liquidity in the system to allow for firm control over short-term interest rates and to allow for normal money market volatility. The challenge for the Fed is that it’s unclear how much liquidity it can remove before markets grow too volatile, so Wall Street has struggled to predict when QT would end. The recent chop in money markets is driven by a number of factors, Fed balance sheet policy included. “There are a number of reasons why this is the case, including some idiosyncratic factors related to tax payment dates, Treasury auction settlements, and increased bill issuance; the biggest factor is the result of the Fed's ongoing balance sheet normalization,” the Jefferies analysts wrote. Still, the challenge of getting a hold on the amount of money market liquidity that would meet the Fed criteria has kept alive views that QT has further to run, especially as bank reserve levels thus far have been stable and QT has thus far mainly extinguished excess liquidity parked in the Fed’s reverse repo facility. To that end, bank reserves have come down but have been fairly close to $3 trillion for some time.   Goldman Sachs forecasters said after Powell’s speech that “we now expect the FOMC to announce at its January meeting that runoff will end in February,” noting they had expected that announcement at the end of the first quarter. (Reporting by Michael S. Derby; Editing by Andrea Ricci)

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By Amina Niasse NEW YORK (Reuters) -WeightWatchers said on Monday it will partner with Amazon to deliver medications including injectable GLP-1 obesity treatments for its members, driving the telehealth provider's shares up 9% as investors expected financial benefits from making it easier to fill prescriptions. WeightWatchers customers will be able to check whether medications are in stock and have the refrigerated drugs delivered more efficiently by using the Amazon Pharmacy option on its website, said WeightWatchers Chief Operating Officer Jon Volkmann. WeightWatchers, also known as WW International, emerged from bankruptcy in July having shed debt and with a plan to compete for online weight-loss customers. Shares of the company rose over 9% to $29.39 in afternoon trading. While its rivals focused on compounded copies of Novo Nordisk's Wegovy and Eli Lilly's Zepbound, WeightWatchers embraced the branded drugs, announcing a partnership with Novo to sell Wegovy to cash-pay customers through NovoCare and its partner CenterWell Pharmacy.  WeightWatchers will continue to allow patients to fill prescriptions through other pharmacies. Demand for GLP-1 obesity treatments soared after clinical trials showed they helped people lose around 15% of body weight by making the stomach feel full. In 2022, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration declared a shortage of the drugs, which Volkmann said made it hard for rural WeightWatchers customers to find them at in-person pharmacies. Now, even with ample supplies of both drugs, Amazon said access in rural areas remains a problem. "We know that with GLP-1s specifically, there has been an issue where folks are pharmacy-hopping, looking for that inventory," said Tanvi Patel, a vice president at Amazon Pharmacy. This month, Amazon launched kiosks where patients at some of its One Medical clinics can pick up common prescriptions. While Amazon sells GLP-1s by mail, drugs that require cold storage will not be available in the kiosks. The company's investment in speedy delivery, especially for perishable items, has allowed Amazon to maintain temperatures for GLP-1 shipments across the country, Patel said. Amazon has shipped GLP-1s to patients since 2020, a spokesperson for the company said. Shipping times for subscribers to Amazon Prime, the e-commerce giant's premium service, are one to two days for all medications. Patel estimated an average four-day delivery time for non-Prime members, but said actual shipping is often faster. Amazon said in June it would provide same-day and next-day delivery to 4,000 additional locales by year-end, targeting small towns and rural areas, and invest over $4 billion to triple its delivery operations by 2026. (Reporting by Amina Niasse; editing by Caroline Humer, Bill Berkrot and Richard Chang)

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By Deborah Mary Sophia and Shubham Kalia (Reuters) -Amazon's cloud services unit AWS was struggling to recover on Monday from a widespread outage that knocked out thousands of websites along with some of the world's most popular apps – Snapchat and Reddit – and disrupted businesses globally. The turmoil marked the largest internet disruption since last year's CrowdStrike malfunction hobbled technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports, and highlights the vulnerability of the world's interconnected technologies. After more than nine hours of disruptions, some applications were gradually coming back online as of 1:00 p.m. ET (1700 GMT). But AWS acknowledged that elevated errors were still affecting several AWS services and that it was working on recovering connectivity. AWS was down for more than 9,300 users as of 1:00 p.m. ET, according to outage tracking website Downdetector. That figure is higher than the earlier peak of about 5,800 reports at 3:48 a.m. ET. Lambda, one of AWS's computing services, was experiencing errors due to issues with an internal subsystem, AWS said in an update on its status page. "We are taking steps to recover this internal Lambda system," it said. AWS said earlier the root cause of the outage is an underlying subsystem that monitors the health of its network load balancers used to distribute traffic across several servers to ensure improved performance and capacity. The issue, AWS said, originated from within the "EC2 internal network." EC2 refers to Amazon's "Elastic Compute Cloud" service, which provides on-demand cloud capacity within AWS. Businesses use EC2 to run virtual servers that they need to develop, launch and host applications, and can scale up or down on capacity as required. Steps to resolve EC2 system-related issues resulted in some early signs of recovery across a few data centers, AWS said in an update on its status page. It is taking similar measures at the remaining locations and expects the problems to subside, AWS added, without providing a specific timeline. While some apps like Reddit and Roblox had largely stabilized, according to outage tracking website Downdetector, others, including Snapchat, PayPal's Venmo and Duolingo, were showing a resurgence in issues seen earlier in the day. ISSUE ORIGINATED FROM AWS SITE KNOWN FOR PREVIOUS OUTAGES AWS provides computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals and is the world's largest cloud provider, followed by Microsoft's Azure and Alphabet's Google Cloud. Disruptions to its servers can cause outages across websites and platforms – ranging from food delivery apps to gaming platforms and airline systems – that rely on its cloud infrastructure. AWS said on its status page that Monday's outage originated at its US-EAST-1 location in northern Virginia, its oldest and largest for web services. The site suffered outages in 2021 and 2020. According to documentation on the AWS website, the US-EAST-1 site is often the default region for many AWS services.  Asked for comment, AWS directed Reuters to its status page. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment. "FRAGILE INFRASTRUCTURES" The problem highlights how interconnected everyday digital services have become and their reliance on a small number of global cloud providers, with one glitch wreaking havoc on business and day-to-day life, experts and academics said. "This outage once again highlights the dependency we have on relatively fragile infrastructures," said Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at European cybersecurity firm ESET. In Britain, Lloyd Bank, Bank of Scotland and telecom service providers Vodafone and BT were all hit, according to Downdetector's UK website, as was UK tax, payments and customs authority HMRC's website. "The main reason for this issue is that all these big companies have relied on just one service," said Nishanth Sastry, director of research at the University of Surrey's Department of Computer Science. Ookla, which owns Downdetector, said over 4 million users reported issues due to the incident. "For major businesses, hours of cloud downtime translate to millions in lost productivity and revenue," said Ryan Griffin, U.S. cyber practice leader at insurance broker McGill and Partners.  FROM SNAPCHAT TO VENMO: OUTAGE TAKES DOWN APPS Ookla said at least a thousand companies were affected by the outage. Snapchat last had over 7,500 reports on Downdetector, lower than the peak of more than 22,000 but still higher than the 4,000 outage instances at around 7:00 a.m. ET. Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and trading app Robinhood all experienced platform disruptions and attributed them to AWS. Amazon's own services, including its shopping website, Prime Video and Alexa, were also hit, although Downdetector last showed a decrease in severity. Fortnite, owned by Epic Games; Clash Royale and Clash of Clans were among the gaming platforms affected. Uber rival Lyft was also knocked down in the United States. In a post on X, Signal President Meredith Whittaker confirmed the messaging app was hit by the outage as well, though billionaire Elon Musk, who owns X, said his platform continued to work. While there has been no indication of a potential cyberattack behind Monday's outage, the scale of the disruption has fed speculation. "When anything like this happens, the concern that it's a cyber incident is understandable," said Rafe Pilling, director of threat intelligence at cybersecurity firm Sophos. "AWS has a far-reaching and intricate footprint, so any issue can cause a major upset." (Reporting by Shubham Kalia, Devika Nair, Ananya Palyekar and Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by James Pearson, Jaspreet Singh and Arsheeya Bajwa; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty, Joe Bavier and Richard Chang)

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