Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Janet Yellen eats dinner

Fed Chair Janet Yellen chomped on a $35.14 dinner at Nopa Kitchen + Bar in Penn Quarter the other week.According to sources Yellen enjoyed her prixe fixe Restaurant Week deal with a group of friends at a quiet dinner.


Wednesday, January 22, 2014

5 talking points about Janet Yellen

1.  Janet Yellen was born in Brooklyn, N.Y.

2. She attended Pembroke, the women’s college of Brown University, where she majored in economics.

3. Yellen earned her economics Ph.D. at Yale University.

4. In 1980, she joined the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate Business School faculty in 1980.

5. President Bill Clinton appointed her to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in 1994.

6. Seeing her wisdom, President Clinton appointed Yellen to head the White House Council of Economic Advisors in 1997.

7. Interestingly, Yellen left the White House in less than two years to rejoin the Berkeley faculty. Her friends suggest the position was too competitive and political for her.

8. In 2004, the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank selected Yellen as president. She made it a center of macroeconomic research.

9. Janet Yellen will the first female Fed Chief in US History

10. Yellen married George Akerlof after only 6 months of dating.

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Yellen's first task in the Fed

The U.S. Senate confirmed Janet Yellen as the next Federal Reserve chair last week. One of her first tasks will be to wind down the "QE3" stimulus program.

The first cut takes place this month. But managing the process to scale it down at the right speed, in the right increments, will require an incredible amount of finesse.

If Yellen leads the Fed to dial back too fast, it could disrupt the budding economic recovery. But if they "taper" too slow, we could get an even more dangerous financial bubble, higher inflation, or both.

This is the reason I call the Federal Reserve the most-powerful economic body in the world. Any mistake on their part could seriously damage the U.S. and the global economy as well.

Thursday, January 2, 2014

Yellen has differed with Bernanke before

Yellen has broken with Bernanke in the past, however. At a 2007 Fed meeting, Bernanke dismissed the danger posed by rising mortgage defaults, saying “the economy looks to be healthy.”

Yellen, a former University of California at Berkeley professor of economics, voiced the opposite opinion.

“The risk for further significant deterioration in the housing market, with house prices falling and mortgage delinquencies rising further, causes me appreciable angst,” she said, according to a transcript.
Yellen said in her Nov. 14 confirmation hearing that she'll maintain the bond-buying program until a “strong recovery” convinces her to end it. She didn't provide details on how she might taper the program.


Read more: http://triblive.com/business/headlines/5342257-74/yellen-fed-housing