Janet Yellen

Janet Yellen
Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve System
Incumbent
Assumed office October 4, 2010
President	Barack Obama
Preceded by	Donald Kohn
Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers
In office February 18, 1997 – August 3, 1999
President	Bill Clinton
Preceded by	Joseph Stiglitz
Succeeded by	Martin Baily
Personal details
Born	Janet Louise Yellen (1946-08-13) August 13, 1946 Brooklyn, New York, U.S.
Political party	Democratic
Spouse(s)	George Akerlof
Alma mater	Brown University (B.A.) Yale University (Ph.D.)
Religion	Jewish

Janet Louise Yellen (born August 13, 1946) is an American economist and professor who is the Vice Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Previously, she was President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President Bill Clinton, and Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business. On October 9, 2013, President Barack Obama nominated Yellen to be Chair of the Federal Reserve. If confirmed, Yellen would be the first woman to hold the position.

Early life and education

Yellen was born in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Anna (née Blumenthal) and Julius Yellen, a physician. She graduated from Fort Hamilton High School in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. She graduated summa cum laude from Brown University with a degree in economics in 1967, and received her Ph.D. in economics from Yale University in 1971.

Yellen is of Jewish heritage and is married to George Akerlof, a Nobel prize-winning economist and professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. Her son, Robert Akerlof, is an assistant professor at the University of Warwick.

Career

Yellen was an assistant professor at Harvard in 1971–76 and an economist with the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in 1977–78. Beginning in 1980, Yellen has been conducting research at the Haas School and teaching macroeconomics to full-time and part-time MBA and undergraduates students. She is now a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business, where she was named Eugene E. and Catherine M. Trefethen Professor of Business and Professor of Economics. Twice she has been awarded the Haas School's outstanding teaching award.

Yellen served as chair of President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers from February 13, 1997 to 1999, and was appointed as a member of the Federal Reserve System's Board of Governors from 1994 to 1997. She has taught at Harvard University and at the London School of Economics. Yellen serves as president of the Western Economic Association International and is a former vice president of the American Economic Association. She was a fellow of the Yale Corporation.

From June 14, 2004, until 2010, Yellen was the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She was a voting member of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) in 2009. Following her appointment to the Federal Reserve in 2004, she spoke publicly, and in meetings of the Fed’s monetary policy committee, about her concern about the potential consequences of the boom in housing prices. However, Yellen did not lead the San Francisco Fed to "move to check [the] increasingly discriminate lending" of Countrywide Financial, the largest lender in the U.S.

In a 2005 speech in San Francisco, Yellen argued against deflating housing bubble because "arguments against trying to deflate a bubble outweigh those in favor of it" and predicted that the housing bubble "could be large enough to feel like a good-sized bump in the road, but the economy would likely be able to absorb the shock." In 2010, Yellen told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that she and other San Francisco Fed officials looked for guidance from Washington because "she had not explored the San Francisco Fed’s ability to act unilaterally," according to the New York Times. Yellen conceded her previous misjudgment of the housing crisis to the Commission: "I guess I thought that similar to the collapse of the stock market around the tech bubble, that most likely the economy could withstand [the housing collapse] and the Fed could move to support the economy the way it had after the tech bubble collapsed."

In July 2009, Yellen was mentioned as a potential successor to Ben Bernanke as chair of the Federal Reserve System, before he was renominated by Barack Obama. She later told an interviewer that such reports were unfounded, and originated in the United Kingdom.^{[citation needed]}

On September 17, 2013, a day after it was confirmed that Lawrence Summers was no longer likely to be appointed to succeed Ben Bernanke, Yellen was widely recognized as the next top pick by U.S. Senate Democrats.

On October 9, 2013, Barack Obama nominated her as the first woman chair of the Federal Reserve, saying, "She had sounded the alarm bell early about the housing market bubble and excesses in the financial markets before the recession. She calls it like she sees it."

Vice Chair

Yellen sworn in by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke in October 2010.

On April 28, 2010, President Obama nominated Yellen to succeed Donald Kohn as vice-chair of the Federal Reserve System. In July, the Senate Banking Committee voted 17 to 6 to confirm her, though the top Republican on the panel, Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, voted no, saying he believed Yellen had an "inflationary bias". At the same time, on the heels of related testimony by Fed chair Bernanke, FOMC voting member James B. Bullard of the St. Louis Fed made a statement that the U.S. economy was "at risk of becoming 'enmeshed in a Japanese-style deflationary outcome within the next several years'".

Bullard's statement was interpreted as a possible shift within the FOMC balance between inflation hawks and doves. Yellen's pending confirmation, along with those of Peter A. Diamond and Sarah Bloom Raskin to fill vacancies, was seen as possibly furthering such a shift in the FOMC. All three nominations were seen as "on track to be confirmed by the Senate".

On October 4, 2010, Yellen was sworn in for a 4-year term ending October 4, 2014. Yellen simultaneously began a 14-year term as a member of the Federal Reserve Board that will expire on January 31, 2024.^{[citation needed]}

On October 9, 2013, Yellen was officially nominated to replace Bernanke as head of the Federal Reserve.

Philosophy

Yellen is considered by many on Wall Street to be a "dove" (more concerned with unemployment than with inflation) and as such to be less likely to advocate Federal Reserve interest rate hikes, as compared, for example, to William Poole (former St. Louis Fed president) a "hawk" (see definitions under Inflation). However, some predict Yellen could act more as a hawk if economic circumstances dictate.

Yellen is a Keynesian economist and believes in the modern version of the Phillips curve, which, in its original, pre-1970s form, stated a simple inverse relationship between unemployment and inflation. In her 2010 nomination hearing for Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, Yellen said, "The modern version of the Phillips curve model--relating movements in inflation to the degree of slack in the economy--has solid theoretical and empirical support."

In a 1995 meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee while serving on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Yellen stated that occasionally letting inflation rise could be a "wise and humane policy" if it increases output. At the same meeting she also claimed that each percentage point reduction in inflation results in a 4.4 percent loss of Gross Domestic Product.

Honors and awards

Yellen received the Wilbur Cross Medal from Yale in 1997, an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Brown in 1998, and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Bard College in 2000. In October 2013, it was announced that she will receive an Honorary Doctorate from the London School of Economics in July 2014, making her and her husband "the first wife and husband team to hold honorary doctorates from the School".

In October 2010, she received the Adam Smith Award from the National Association for Business Economics (NABE).

In 2012, she was elected Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association.

In September 2012, she was included in the 50 Most Influential list of Bloomberg Markets magazine.

Positions held

• 2010–present Vice Chair, Board of Governors, Federal Reserve System
• 2004–2010 President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco
• 1997–1999 Chair, President's Council of Economic Advisers
• 1994–1997 Member, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
• 1985–present Professor, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley
• 1982–1985 Associate Professor, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley
• 1980–1982 Assistant Professor, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley
• 1978–1980 Lecturer, London School of Economics and Political Science
• 1977–1978 Economist, Division of International Finance, Trade and Financial Studies Section, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
• 1971–1976 Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Harvard University
• 1974 Research Fellow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

External service and assignments

• President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco
• Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2001
• Vice President, Western Economics Association, 2001
• Fellow, Yale Corporation 2000–
• Member, National Academy of Sciences Panel on Ensuring the Best Presidential Science and Technology Appointments, 2000
• Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research, 1999–
• Advisory Board, Center for International Political Economy, 1999–
• Advisory Board, Brookings Panel on Economic Activity, 1999
• Chair: Economic Policy Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development 1997–1999
• President's Interagency Committee on Women's Business Enterprise (1997)
• Member and adviser: Brookings Panel on Economic Activity (senior advisor); Advisor Panel in Economics, National Science Foundation;
• Adviser: Congressional Budget Office
• Research fellow: Yale University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Trustee of the Economists for Peace and Security

Selected works

Books

• The Fabulous Decade: Macroeconomic Lessons from the 1990s (with Alan Blinder), The Century Foundation Press, New York, 2001. ISBN 0-87078-467-6

Research articles

• "The Continuing Importance of Trade Liberalization," Business Economics (1998).
• "Trends in Income Inequality and Policy Responses," Looking Ahead, October 1997 and James Auerbach and Richard Belous, eds., "The Inequality Paradox: Growth of Income Disparity," National Policy Association, 1998
• "Monetary Policy: Goals and Strategy," Business Economics (July 1996).
• "An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing in the United States," (with George Akerlof and Michael Katz). Quarterly Journal of Economics (May 1996) adapted into a Policy Brief prepared for the Fall 1996 issue of the Brookings Review doi:10.2307/2946680
• "How Large are the Losses from Rule of Thumb Behavior in Models of the Business Cycle?" (with George Akerlof) in Willima Brainard, William Nordhaus, and Harold Watts, eds. Money, Macroeconomics and Economic Policy: Essays in Honor of James Tobin, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press (1991). ISBN 0-262-02325-3
• "East Germany In From the Cold: The Economic Aftermath of Currency Union" (with George Akerlof, Andrew Rose, and Helga Hessenius), Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 1991:1.

External links

• Janet L. Yellen at the Federal Reserve System
• Statements and Speeches of Janet L. Yellen (1995 – 2011) at FRASER (Federal Reserve Archive)
• Janet L. Yellen (2004 – 2010) at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco
• Profile at the Haas School of Business
• Profile and Papers at Research Papers in Economics/RePEc
• Publications at the National Bureau of Economic Research
• Janet Yellen at the Notable Names Database
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Janet Yellen at the Internet Movie Database
• Works by or about Janet Yellen in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Janet Yellen collected news and commentary at Bloomberg News
• Janet Yellen collected news and commentary at The Guardian
• Janet Yellen collected news and commentary at The Wall Street Journal

Political offices
Preceded by Joseph Stiglitz	Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers 1997–1999	Succeeded by Martin Baily
Civic offices
Preceded by Robert Parry	President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco 2004–2010	Succeeded by John Williams
Preceded by Donald Kohn	Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve System 2010–present	Incumbent