Obama Names Yellen as Federal Reserve Chairwoman

October 9, 2013 – President Obama today nominated Federal Reserve Vice Chair Janet Yellen to lead the U.S. central bank. As Fed chairwoman, Yellen will be the top regulator of the nation’s financial system and will have vast power over the economy.

If confirmed by the Senate, Yellen will be the first woman to lead the institution in its 100-year history. The advocate for aggressive action to stimulate U.S. economic growth through low interest rates and large-scale bond purchases would replace Ben Bernanke, whose second term as Fed chairman expires on January 31.

Yellen, who was chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Clinton administration, would become the first Democrat to lead the Fed since Paul A. Volcker stepped down in 1987.

Since the 1990s, Yellen has alternated among jobs at the Fed, the White House and her academic home, the University of California at Berkeley. She was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco from 2004 to 2010, when she warned about looming dangers in the real estate market and was a participant in the Fed’s crisis response.

Obama picked her to serve as Fed vice chairman under Bernanke. In that post, she has been a key force pushing Bernanke and the rest of the Fed to embrace more-aggressive policies to reduce unemployment.

Yellen, whose academic speciality focused on the labor market, also has worked at the London School of Economics and as a professor at Harvard, as well as serving as a staffer at the Fed in the late 1970s. She received an undergraduate degree from Brown University and a doctorate in economics from Yale University.

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