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Receiving Wide Coverage ...All Over But for the Yellen: A new conventional wisdom has congealed in the week since Larry Summers withdrew his name from consideration: that Janet Yellen will be nominated to take the helm of the Fed. Yellen's seeming momentum was reinforced by a Wall Street Journal report that the White House is urging Democratic senators to defend her against potential attacks. Further feeding the Yellen surge: dueling profiles in the Journal and the Financial Times that may leave readers feeling whiplash. The Journal emphasizes that the Fed's vice chair has clashed with others at the central bank "and left some hard feelings in the wake of those confrontations," while the FT's much more glowing article gives the opposite impression, concluding that "Janet Yellen is unusually kind and decent." Meanwhile, the Washington Post's Ezra Klein writes that Summers lost out because liberal Democrats have big fundamental disagreements with President Obama about financial regulation, and they saw Summers as a stand-in for the president.
September 23 -
The first thing President Obama should have done after Larry Summers withdrawal was nominate Janet Yellen to be Fed chairman. Appointing the first woman to lead the Fed should be a historic moment. Obama has turned it into a consolation prize.
September 17 -
Incremental gains in women's progress are no longer a sufficient substitute for meaningful change.
August 29
President Obama will nominate Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Janet Yellen tomorrow to head the U.S. central bank, a White House official said in an e-mailed statement.
Yellen, 67, would succeed Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, whose term ends Jan. 31. She was the favorite in surveys of economists and had the backing of 20 members of the Senate Democratic caucus who signed a July 26 letter to Obama.
The announcement will come tomorrow during a 3 p.m. event at the White House, the official said. Bernanke will be present for the event.
Obama turned to Yellen, vice chairman of the Fed since 2010, after the other leading candidate, former Treasury secretary and White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers, withdrew from consideration amid mounting opposition from Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee.
As the Fed's No. 2 official, Yellen has articulated the case for maintaining highly accommodative monetary policy. In a series of 2012 speeches, she outlined why interest rates could remain near zero into late 2015, and in a 2011 speech she justified the Fed's first two rounds of large-scale asset purchases with an estimate that the programs would create 3 million jobs.
