Saudi Arabia is largely responsible for the dramatic fall in oil and gas prices in recent months, a U.S. government official said.

Richard Fisher, the head of the Dallas Federal Reserve, said “the Saudis have engineered” the oil crisis. He was speaking at the Economic Club of New York.

“We are a huge supplier of energy. The Saudis took a while to realize what was going on,” Fisher said, referring to the massive growth of the U.S. oil industry in recent years.

Fisher is the most prominent U.S. official to pin the blame largely on Saudi Arabia.

As recently as July, oil traded at over $100 a barrel. By January, it had plunged below $50.

Saudi officials have repeatedly blamed supply and demand for the price meltdown. They say they were caught off guard by the price decline, and acknowledge this is putting a lot of pressure on U.S. shale.

“Although Saudi Arabia and OPEC countries did not engineer the reduction in the price of oil, there’s a positive side effect, whereby at a certain price, we will see how many shale oil production companies run out of business,” Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a member of the Saudi royal family and prominent global investor, said in January.

The oil games: While the price of oil started falling at the end of the summer, it was exacerbated on Thanksgiving Day when OPEC, led by Saudi Arabia, voted not to scale back on production. That send oil prices diving.

Fisher also noted that the Saudis benefit not just economically, but politically from the oil price decline. Low oil prices especially hurt their biggest regional rival: Iran.

“I’m sure King Abdullah thought to himself, ‘I’ve also done a favor vis-a-vis Iran,'” Fisher said.  Iran’s economy needs oil to trade around $135. Saudi has far larger cash reserves and is thus able to withstand a downturn in prices for much longer.

What’s ahead for oil prices? Given how motivated Saudi Arabia is to keep prices low right now, Fisher doesn’t expect oil will shoot up to $100 a barrel again any time soon.

“From a budget stand point, [the Saudis] have reserves that can handle this,” he said.

While many energy companies are laying off workers and slashing spending, Fisher said that cheap oil’s overall impact on the U.S. economy will be positive. A typical American driver is expected to save $750 this year at the pump, according to government estimates.

Even in his home state of Texas, Fisher said the economy has diversified a lot more beyond oil, so it’s unlikely to be nearly as bad of an effect as the last oil bust of the 1980s.

Globally, approximately 22 percent of elected parliamentary seats go to women but in Rwanda, that figure is an impressive 64 percent. In the wake of the Rwandan genocide, 70 percent of the country’s surviving population was female, and this along with a quota requiring 30 percent of political candidates to be female, helped bring about massive change.

How does Rwanda compare to other countries across the world? Andorra, perched high in the Pyrenees between France and Spain, comes second with a 50-50 gender split in its parliament. Cuba rounds off the top three with just under 49 percent. What about the United States? It’s all the way down in 72nd position – only 20 percent of government seats in the United States are held by women.

The head of the U.N. agency promoting equality for women is lamenting that a girl born today will be an 81-year-old grandmother before she has the same chance as a man to be CEO of a company — and she will have to wait until she’s 50-years-old to have an equal chance to lead a country.

Twenty years after 189 countries adopted a blueprint to achieve equality for women, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka said that not a single country has reached gender parity and equality.

The executive director of UN Women spoke ahead of International Women’s Day on Friday and next week’s meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women. The commission will review the 150-page platform for action to achieve equality that was adopted at the groundbreaking U.N. women’s conference in Beijing in 1995.

Although there has been progress since Beijing, especially in women’s health and girls’ education, Mlambo-Ngcuka said, there are fewer than 20 female heads of state and government, and the number of women lawmakers has increased from 11 percent to just 22 percent in the last two decades.

“We just don’t have critical mass to say that post-Beijing women have reached a tipping point in their representation,” she said.

The Beijing platform called for governments to end discrimination against women and close the gender gap in 12 critical areas including health, education, employment, political participation and human rights. For the first time, it recognized that women have the right to control their own sexuality without coercion, and reaffirmed their right to decide whether and when to have children.

Mlambo-Ngcuka said UN Women is looking for 10 world leaders, 10 CEOs and 10 universities to “break the mode” and become champions of the agency’s “He for She” campaign, which calls on the world’s male leaders, fathers, sons, husbands and brothers to stand up and support equality for women in all areas of life.”

Roughly 2.5 billion adults in the world don’t have access to banks, which means somewhere in the order of 5 billion people belong to households that are cut off from a financial system that the rest of us take for granted. They can’t start savings accounts. They don’t have checking accounts. They can’t get credit cards. They live in places where banks don’t want to go, and because of this, they remain effectively walled off from the global economy. They are called the unbanked. But they are not unreachable, not by a long shot, and one of the biggest and most exciting prospects bitcoiners talk about is using their cryptocurrency to bring these billions of people roaring into the twenty-first century, Foreign Affairs points out.

The Caribbean is an area of the emerging-market world where a strong case can be made for locals to use bitcoin to get around a restric­tive financial system.

Should women in developing countries use bitcoins?

Takashi Nakamichi writes:  Japan’s central bank should hold fire on extra measures for some time to ensure the economy doesn’t “overheat,” an economic adviser to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said.

The inflation rate may be falling back toward zero on a drop in global oil prices, but it will “eventually start rising on its own” and likely reach around 2% by early 2016.

Mr. Honda, one of the most vocal advocates of aggressive monetary easing, said cheaper oil in the long run will strengthen inflationary pressure by stimulating consumer spending. A weak yen, the effects of the ongoing Bank of Japan easing, and anticipated increases in base pay this year will also put upward pressure on prices.

“Under these circumstances, if you undertook additional monetary easing, (the inflation rate) would go even higher,” Mr. Honda, a Shizuoka University professor, said. “Is it necessary to do such a thing?”

Mr. Honda added that even if the inflation rate declines further, as long as the main cause of it is an oil-driven drop in costs, and as long as Japan’s demand-supply gap is improving, “additional easing shouldn’t be undertaken.” Otherwise, the economy “could overheat over the latter half of this year,” he said.

Mr. Honda’s remarks were the latest in a series of comments from the government and advisers to the prime minister suggesting that the Abe administration sees additional easing as counterproductive, at least in the near-term. The development represents a rare departure from the traditional pattern in which the government regularly pushes the BOJ to do more to end a decade and a half of deflation.

Ruling party politicians appear particularly worried that if extra easing causes the yen to weaken more, further raising the costs of imports, that would reflect poorly on their parties in next month’s municipal elections. Yet if domestic demand remains weak beyond the summer, further easing could become necessary.  The yen’s  period of excessive strength appears to have ended.

A measure of fair value known as purchasing power parity suggests the present dollar-yen levels may be at a kind of upper limit in the exchange rate’s comfort zone.

The yen could weaken further if the BOJ takes additional easing action or if the U.S. Federal Reserve starts raising its policy interest rate, but that would only be a temporary “overshoot,” Mr. Honda said. “Even if the Japanese yen depreciated more, it would come back to the comfort zone. That’s my guess.”