Yellen Assumes Chair of Federal Reserve
Tuesday, February 4th, 2014February 4, 2014
Yesterday, Janet Yellen was sworn in as chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve (the Fed), the central U.S. bank. She is the first woman to assume that position. She succeeds Ben Bernanke, who chaired the Fed for eight years.
In 1994, Yellen joined the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve following her appointment by President Bill Clinton. In 2004, she became head of the Federal Reserve branch of San Francisco. Yellen attained the position of vice chair of the Fed’s Board of Governors in 2010.
Before joining the Fed, Yellen was a highly respected academic in the field of economics. With her husband, Nobel Prize-winning economist George Akerlof, Yellen coauthored a number of scholarly papers, including studies of the merging of the East and West German economies upon reunification in 1990 and examinations of the economic dynamics of unemployment. Yellen taught economics at Harvard University, the London School of Economics, and the University of California at Berkeley.
Janet Yellen was born on Aug. 13, 1946, in Brooklyn, New York. Her father was a physician and her mother, a school teacher. She attended Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and subsequently earned a doctorate at Yale University. She married George Akerlof in 1978.
Yellen takes the helm as the central bank begins to unwind a program–known as quantitative easing–that was implemented to stimulate the U.S. economy during the recession of 2008 and 2009. The program involves the purchase of massive amounts of U.S. Treasury and mortgage bonds, which pumped billions of dollars into the economy. The Fed simultaneously held long-term bank interest rates at record low levels. The program–which was based on the theories of English economist John Maynard Keynes–was not universally popular. Conservative economists and politicians claimed pumping so much money into the economy would trigger inflation. This proved not to be true.
In late January, then-Fed Chair Ben Bernanke announced that the monthly bond purchases would be cut from $85 billion to $65 billion in response to “cumulative” signs that the economy was improving. The U.S. Department of Commerce subsequently announced that the economy had grown at a healthy 3.2-percent annual rate in the final quarter of 2013.
Additional World Book articles:
- Economics, U.S. 2010 (a Back in Time article)
- Economics, U.S. 2012 (a Back in Time article)
- Economic Crisis: The Banking Meltdown (a special report)
- Economics Crisis: The Government Jumps In (a special report)
- Economics Crises: Then and Now (a special report)