President Barack Obama announced that he will nominate Janet Yellen as chairman of the Federal Reserve, which would put the world’s most powerful central bank in the hands of a key architect of its unprecedented stimulus program and the first female leader in its 100-year history, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. 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 a top deputy to Bernanke, Yellen supported the central bank’s unprecedented bond buying programs and was a driving force behind a new strategy adopted in 2012 to commit the central bank to goals on inflation and unemployment. As the Fed’s No. 2 official, she 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. Yellen, 67, would succeed Ben S. Bernanke, whose term expires on Jan. 31.
