The Federal Reserve officially has a new queen. The old ruler, Ben Bernanke, is leaving, having fought to save the American economy from a new Great Depression. Now it's Janet Louise Yellen's turn, born in 1946, a former deputy of the central bank in Washington, who after her swearing-in was crowned president of her Fed.Now all eyes are on her. The sword is still in the stone. It's up to her to extract it definitively to start the recovery and positively exploit the last moves of her predecessor.
The business is not that simple. Yellen, the first woman to head the Federal Reserve after a long line of men, must now prepare to face the fierce questions of unwilling people. “Two dozen Fed staff members – writes the online newspaper politico.com – will flock to a classroom near the central bank's council chamber and bombard it with questions on every possible topic, from economic policy to banking regulation and international affairs. Yellen's inquisitors will imitate the style of lawmakers, generally interested in monologues rather than asking real questions, just to see how she responds. The interrogation could last several hours for several consecutive days.
Yellen arrives at a critical moment. She herself jokingly called herself a Luke Skywalker who replaces a Bernanke-Obi Wan Kenobi. The wars, in this case, will not be stellar, but the challenges to be faced sometimes take on a galactic dimension.
The new president must manage the tapering, the policy of reducing the massive stimulus program to the American economy, without creating too many problems for the global economy. You must then appease the spirits of the Republicans, who see the Fed as a dangerous rogue body. And you must do all of this by communicating it effectively to Wall Street traders who know little about you and to the American public.
Yellen was celebrated in a Microsoft commercial as “one of the heroic women of 2013”. Many have focused on her being a woman, rather than on her story. In reality, the new Fed president does not like to talk about gender issues and how much being a woman has affected her forty-year career. She also told staff members – writes the Washington Post – that her new title would simply be “chair”, not “chairwoman”.
It's not the first time Yellen has broken gender barriers in a field rather known for pervasive machismo. Among the wolves of Wall Street, the economist doesn't want to play the predator or Little Red Riding Hood. But, rather, his job.
She was the only woman in her PhD program at Yale. In her early years as an academic and economist, she suffered the skeptical looks of her colleagues on her abilities and remained in the shadow of a more extroverted and well-known husband: George Akerlof, Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001, author of the famous "The market for lemons”, the market for bins, which the economist Giovanni Ferri had already talked about on Firstonline last October. The essay, considered by some (too) revolutionary, focuses on the uncertainty about the quality of the good being traded, which can lead to situations of market dysfunction.
“Yellen's silence – comments the Washington Post – is a good reminder of the fact that the workplace is still a treacherous terrain for many women. She didn't say a word how wrong US President Barack Obama was and called her 'Mr. Yellen'e used the same strategy she's been using for 40 years: She let her work do the talking for her.” “A woman has to prove more than once that she is as good as another colleague – said the economist Meghnad Desai, who worked with Yellen in the XNUMXs – I never thought that in the end she would really make it get what he deserved."
Economist, professor emeritus at the University of California in Berkeley, former vice president of the Fed, Janet Louise Yellen was chief economic adviser to the White House in the Clinton administration (1997-99) and chairman of the San Francisco Federal Reserve (2004- 10). Born in Brooklyn, Yellen graduated cum laude in Economics from Brown University in 1967 and then obtained a Ph.D. from Yale in 1971. Already in July 2009 she had been mentioned in the list of candidates for the succession of outgoing president Ben Bernanke, then reappointed for a second term.
