Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Thursday, November 4th, and this is your FT news briefing.

The Federal Reserve finally said when it's going to start scaling back its pandemic bond buying

program, the UK is turning to cutter for its energy security, and Iran nuclear talks are back

on the table. Plus, Argentina is in an economic crisis again, and this time it's warned that it

can't pay its next bill to the International Monetary Fund.

A default to the IMF would be almost unprecedented. I mean, this has only ever happened very, very

rarely with any country. I'm Mark Filipino, and here's the news you need to start your day.

The Federal Reserve said it would start winding down into $120 billion a month bond buying

program in a few months. The pandemic stimulus could wind down altogether by next June.

I'm joined by the FTZUS Economics Editor, Colby Smith. Hey, Colby.

Hi there.

So how big is this moment, Colby? The fact that we've been talking about this for months.

I think it is a pretty momentous occasion, even though as you rightly point out,

it's something that we've long been expecting. I mean, for the past, I want to say six months or so,

the Fed has really been trying to prepare markets in a way for this moment

by trickling out, you know, meeting after a meeting that they were inching closer to this decision,

even before we got to yesterday, the Fed had even stipulated and signaled in some way the pace at

which it'd be winding down these purchases. So it didn't leave much, you know, to surprise investors

yesterday. And I think that's exactly the way in which the Fed wanted to go about doing this.

But that being said, it is the first kind of substantive move towards tighter monetary policy

for the central bank. Right, and in many ways yesterday was kind of the opposite of what's

called the taper tantrum. The S&P was a little bit, you know, not a lot of market movement.

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