Tausi Insider

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and U.S. Treasury Chief Lynn Malerba sign on banknotes at an event in Fort Worth, Tex., on Dec. 8. SHELBY TAUBER/Reuters Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Thursday helped mark a milestone in U.S. history when she held up a newly minted $5 bill signed for the first time ever by two women. Yellen’s signature will appear alongside that of U.S. Treasurer Lynn Malerba, the first Native American in that position. Yellen joked during a stop in Texas about the bad handwriting of some of her male predecessors and said, “I will admit, I spent some quality time practising my signature.” “Two women on the currency for the first time is truly momentous,” added Malerba, who travelled with Yellen to a Bureau of Engraving and Printing facility in Forth Worth to provide their signatures. They ceremonially signed fresh sheets of bills in $1 and $5 denominations and posed with samples to mark the history-making moment. The new notes will go into circulation next ye...

An eagle tops the U.S. Federal Reserve building's facade, in Washington, on July 31, 2013. Jonathan Ernst/Reuters The Federal Reserve’s effort to shock the economy back to lower inflation is in its early days, making it tough for the U.S. central bank to avoid overdoing it with higher-than-needed interest rates, a top economic adviser in the Obama White House said after a fresh review of Fed policy since the Second World War. The Fed has raised its target policy rate by more than 4 percentage points in the last year, and “we are just now entering the window where the effects might start to be noticed,” Christina Romer, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and chair of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) from 2009 to 2010, told a national gathering of economists late on Saturday. “Because of the lags involved, policymakers are going to face a very difficult decision about when to stop rate increases or reverse course,” Romer said in a ...