The nomination of Janet Yellen to be the next chair of the US Federal Reserve is an excellent one, especially with all the uncertainty over the US government shutdown and fears over breaching the debt ceiling. The US economy needs continuity in its monetary policy and Yellen, whom I supported for the job, guarantees a seamless transition from Ben Bernanke. Best of all, it’s one for the doves. She will have no trouble at all being confirmed by the US Senate, even though folks such as Rand Paul will vote against her because they don’t believe there should be a central bank. She needs only 60 out of 100 votes to be confirmed, and will be.
The appointment of Professor Yellen has been welcomed by economists no matter what their economic persuasion, Keynesian or monetarist, saltwater (Harvard) or freshwater (Chicago). There have been few if any dissenting voices. Her CV is second to none. She is definitely the number-one central banker in the world; Mark Carney was just the best central banker available in the banker draft when George Osborne chose him to lead the Bank of England.
Yellen, who is only five feet tall, obtained her PhD from Yale, where she was supervised by the Nobel economics laureate James Tobin. She taught at Harvard and the LSE before moving to the University of California, Berkeley. She first worked at “the Fed” as an economist in the 1970s and then returned as a governor from 1994-1997, when I met her as a feisty but “small lady with a large IQ”, as the New York Times has said. She was chair of Bill Clinton’s council of economic advisers from 1997-1999.
From 2004-2011 Yellen was the president and chief executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and, as the 12 bank presidents do, attended Fed rate-setting meetings. In 2010 she returned to the Fed as a governor and vice-chair. She is married to the Nobel economics laureate George Akerlof; they have a son who is an economist at the University of Warwick.
Yellen is a distinguished academic, especially known for her work on unemployment. She has even written about out-of-wedlock child-rearing, gang behaviour and the brain drain; she cares about the real world and her work involves careful analysis of behaviour.
The new Fed chief is especially concerned about long-duration unemployment and its consequences. Her view is that, for now, inflation can go on the back burner –which is music to my ears, given my recent work showing that a 1 percentage point increase in unemployment lowers well-being by over four times as much as an equivalent increase in inflation.
Yellen has been influential in developing the forward guidance on interest rates that the Bank of England has copied. There will be no rate rises any time soon on her watch unless something dramatic and good happens. I couldn’t ask for better than that.
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