Focused Read in 3 minutes
Not a live Tweet but... a great visual of friends of
Janet Yellen's paying tribute to her through what is,
apparently, a signature move for her:
"Popping her collar!" ⬇
Yellen's historic legacy, Wise caution & a successful recovery
Millions of Americans are
back to work, and they have Yellen to thank.
When she began her four-year term as
the first woman to lead the Federal Reserve in 2014, the unemployment
rate was 6.7%. Today it's 4.1%, the lowest in 17 years.
"There's less to lose sleep about
now than has been true for quite some time, so I feel good about the
economic outlook," Yellen said during her final press conference
in December. "The labor market is in a very much stronger place
than it was eight years ago."
That, she said, is "tremendously
important to the well-being" of Americans.
And it's no accident.
Yellen proved to be a deliberate,
careful leader as she helped steer the economy through a dangerous
time -- the years between a historic recession and something close to
a normal recovery.
"The thing that Janet
had to figure out was how to turn around and get back to a normal
policy and not do it too fast," said Alice Rivlin, a senior
fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former vice chair at the
Fed, who previously worked with Yellen.
Yellen was nominated by former
President Barack Obama and began serving in 2014. President Trump
chose not to put her up for four more years, instead nominating Fed
governor Jerome Powell. Yellen is the first Fed chair in decades to
serve a single term.
A trained economist, she repeatedly
made the case for job training programs to help American workers gain
the skills they needed for the jobs that were in demand. She visited
job training programs in Philadelphia and Cleveland to hear about
challenges facing the nation's workforce.
... This weekend, Yellen hands the baton to
Powell, who served under her as a Fed governor. On Monday, she'll
join a long roster of former Fed colleagues at Brookings, where
she'll continue studying the U.S. economy and the labor market.
At a warm sendoff for Yellen in the
Fed's historic Eccles Building, Powell told hundreds of staff that
Yellen was the most qualified person ever to be named Fed chair,
according to a person who attended the private event on Thursday.
Staff burst into applause as Yellen
arrived to speak in the atrium, according to the attendee. She spent
an hour speaking with young members of the Fed staff and taking
selfies.
And as a final tribute to Yellen and
her penchant for turning her collar up, Powell popped his own collar
at the end of his remarks. Her future colleagues at Brookings, staff
at the New York Fed and others on social media posted photos of
themselves on Twitter with the hashtag #PopYourCollar.
"It was the right appointment at
the right moment," Rivlin said.
When she started the job, Yellen was
quickly confronted with pressure to begin lifting rates, which had
remained historically low since the crisis. Some of her Fed
colleagues were anxious over when to act.
Wait too long, Yellen's critics warned,
and inflation could take off. Move too quickly, and the fragile
economic recovery could be derailed.
Yellen persuaded her colleagues to move
slowly, and she eased the Fed into a new normal of long-lasting low
interest rates.
"She was cautious and
deliberate and always based decisions on good analysis and facts,"
Rivlin said.
The Fed waited until
December 2015, seven full years after the crisis, to begin
raising its benchmark rate, and only raised it four more times.
And the feared rise in
prices never materialized. Even Yellen has conceded it's something of
a mystery, but it helped prove her right.
Part of Yellen's legacy may be that she
was astute at the right moments and made the right choices during a
delicate period for the U.S. Economy.
But it's a fact that the economy
benefited.
Yellen's term ended Friday with the
U.S. economy adding a healthy 200,000 jobs in January, making it the
first time the economy has added jobs during every month of any Fed
chair's tenure.
"Time won't tell," said David
Henderson, a research fellow with the Stanford University's Hoover
Institution. "Those are accomplishments."
You can read more here
"Who Is Janet Yellen?"
Born in Brooklyn, New
York, in 1946, Janet Yellen earned a bachelor's degree in economics
from Brown University in 1967 and a Ph.D. from Yale University in
1971. After spending much of her early career in academia, she served
on the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 1997 to 1999,
and in 2004 she became president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank
of San Francisco. Yellen was selected to serve as vice chair of the
Federal Reserve Board of Governors in 2010, and in 2014 she became
the first woman to serve as its chair. Despite her role in helping to
shrink the national unemployment rate, Yellen announced her
resignation in November 2017, after President Donald Trump revealed
he would not nominate her for a second term.
You can read more of her biography here
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(Wallace, a Republican, an inactive Republican I believe she calls herself,
is new to the job but for right now she has clearly put country over party and
her work on Trump GOP has been credible, IMO... )
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