Employment

"It’s customary that Treasury Secretaries provide their signature to be featured on our nation’s currency. You’d think this would be a straightforward process. But the founding fathers did not account for what seems to be a common attribute for Treasury Secretaries: terrible handwriting. My friend Tim Geithner famously had to change his signature in order to make it legible. In an interview back in 2012, he described that the change was made not for “elegance” but simply for “clarity.” President Obama joked during Jack Lew’s nomination as Secretary that he should try to make “at least one letter legible” in his signature. The good news is that President Biden did not make a similar request when he nominated me. But I’ll admit: I spent some quality time practicing my signature before submitting it to Director Olijar."    more »

Jo Freeman reviews My People: Five Decades of Writing About Black Lives by Charlayne Hunter-Gault; nine republished pieces are about Africa and another nine are about different aspects of her personal life in the US – a stay in Harlem when she was five, returning to U.Ga nine years after she integrated it, vacationing in Martha’s Vineyard. Eleven are on women. She interviewed the famous (e.g. Nelson Mandela), the infamous (e.g. the Black Panthers) and the not famous (her grandmother). more »

"EEOC data (for 2018 – 2020) showed representation for both minorities and women was relatively flat or marginally increased. Black and Hispanic representation remained at about 3 and 4 percent, respectively. Female representation increased from 31 to 32 percent in that period. Representatives of financial services firms and other stakeholders with whom GAO spoke for the November 2017 report (GAO-18-64) described challenges in recruiting and retaining members of minority groups and women. They also identified practices that could help address the challenges, including recruiting students from a broad group of schools and academic disciplines and establishing management-level accountability to achieve diversity goals." more »

Overall Economic Activity: Economic activity was about flat or up slightly since the previous report, down from the modest average pace of growth in the prior Beige Book period...Interest rates and inflation continued to weigh on activity, and many contacts expressed greater uncertainty or increased pessimism concerning the outlook...Inflation pushed low-to-moderate income consumers to substitute increasingly to lower-priced goods. Travel and tourism contacts, by contrast, reported moderate gains in activity, as restaurants and high-end hospitality venues enjoyed robust demand. Higher interest rates further dented home sales, which declined at a moderate pace overall but fell steeply in some districts; apartment leasing started to slow, as well. more »