Owners to Refinance $165 Billion

U.S. Treasuries edged down in Asia on Tuesday, giving up some of the previous day's gains, with investors now eyeing a three-year note auction a day before a Federal Reserve policy-setting meeting , Reuters reports.

Meanwhile, that’s making it tough for owners to refinance almost $165 billion of mortgages for skyscrapers, shopping malls, and hotels this year, pressuring companies such as Maguire Properties Inc., the largest office landlord in downtown Los Angeles, to put buildings up for sale.

The industry is likely to be high on the agenda when Bernanke and his colleagues sit down in Washington today at the Federal Open Market Committee meeting on monetary policy. Lawmakers including Barney Frank and Carolyn Maloney are pushing the central bank to extend an aid program designed to restore the flow of credit , Boston Globe reports.

However, the Fed's need for more traders is a direct consequence of the central bank's efforts to keep credit flowing through the US economy. The Fed has been buying fixed-income securities at such a rate that its assets have more than doubled to $2,000bn in the past year, leading the central bank to conclude that it needs more people to monitor the markets and to manage its credit risks.

Patricia Mosser, senior adviser, said: "Once we started to have to implement programmes that were clearly outside the traditional credit-easing tools that the Fed has used before, it became illogical to manage some of the new programmes inside the current structure.” , Financial Times reports.