(Reuters) - Reuters News has named one of its top editors, Alessandra Galloni, as its next editor-in-chief, the first woman to lead the globe-spanning news agency in its 170-year history.

A native of Rome, Galloni, 47, will replace Stephen J. Adler, who is retiring this month after leading the newsroom for the past decade. Under his leadership, Reuters has received hundreds of journalism awards, including seven Pulitzer Prizes, the industry’s highest honor.

A speaker of four languages, and with broad experience covering business and political news at Reuters and previously at the Wall Street Journal, Galloni takes the helm as the news agency faces an array of challenges. Some of these are common to all news media. Others are specific to the organization’s complexity: With a worldwide staff of some 2,450 journalists, Reuters serves a range of divergent customers and is also a unit in a much larger information-services business.

Since 2008, Reuters has been part...

At the end of 2020, Americans owed $14 trillion more to the rest of the world than the rest of the world owed to America, according to the latest reading on the nation’s Net Investment Position (NIIP) from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). That’s 67 percent of U.S. GDP, up from about 50 percent at the end of 2019 and well above the 16 percent of GDP recorded a decade ago.

This blog discusses two questions: First, how did we get here? After all, U.S. current account deficits have been moderate during the past decade. So why has the U.S. net debtor position increased so much? Second, is this increase in net foreign liabilities a cause for concern? (Spoiler: Not much.)

During the past 25 years, low interest rates and highly expansionary monetary policy with little apparent inflation have created the illusion that a government can simply print money to fund exorbitant deficit spending with no repercussions. This core tenet of so-called "modern monetary theory" ignores the fact that deficit spending is constrained in the long run by a government's ability to satisfy creditors.

Federal Reserve Bank of Boston President Eric Rosengren in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Monday said he sees no urgency for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates even with a positive economic outlook, and laid out some guidance on how much of an inflation increase he is willing to tolerate. Mr. Rosengren also flagged where he sees risks in the financial system and said research by the Fed related to climate change is entirely appropriate. Here is a transcript of the interview, lightly edited for clarity.

MICHAEL S. DERBY: One place I wanted to start out is a place that some of your colleagues have talked about recently. What was the liftoff dot you submitted to the [Summary of Economic Expectations] forecast back at the March FOMC meeting?

MR. ROSENGREN: Yeah, so I don’t publicly talk about my liftoff dot. What I would say is that I’m expecting a very strong economy over the course of this year, I’m expecting the unemployment rate to get...

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A growing chorus has called on the Fed to diversify its ranks at all levels to reflect better the heterogeneity of the United States. So far most of these efforts speak to the diversity of the Fed’s principals, namely, the members of the Fed’s Board of Governors and the presidents of the twelve Federal Reserve Banks. In this study, we dig deeply into a vital part of Federal Reserve governance that has so far not received the same sustained attention: the directors of the Federal Reserve Banks, those responsible for choosing the presidents of the Federal Reserve Banks in the first instance. We find a staggering homogeneity among them, with only recent signs of diversification. They are overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male, and overwhelmingly drawn from the business communities within their districts, with little participation from minorities, women, or from areas of the economy—labor, nonprofits, the academy—with important contributions to make to Fed governance....

After a year in which toilet-tissue shortages left consumers scrambling for squares, sales are plummeting to below pre-pandemic levels.

Bath-tissue sales in January fell more than 4% from the same period a year earlier, before the spread of Covid-19 spurred Americans to load up on staples from toilet paper to sanitary wipes, according to figures from NielsenIQ. The decline, which comes even though legions of Americans continue to work and attend school from home, indicates last year’s stockpiling is starting to have an effect on sales.

“You never knew when you weren’t going to be able to get it, so every time we went out we got some,” said Marjorie Greenburgh, 62 years old, of New Rochelle, N.Y. “They just kept amassing.”

Ms. Greenburgh still has 54 rolls, stored in various places throughout her home: in a guest room, the back of a linen closet, the laundry room in the basement. “I’m not planning on buying for a while,” she said.

Demand for...

Republicans are warning that President Joe Biden is taking a risky gamble that he can carry out his massive spending plans without triggering runaway inflation. Biden is betting on history as his defense.

The specter of raging inflation — the erosion of consumer purchasing power — has become central to the debate about whether the government can afford Biden’s multitrillion-dollar “Build Back Better” programs. But years can go by before soaring inflation ever takes hold — and Biden will probably be gone from the White House if the country finds out that his critics were right.

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