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Janet Yellen
b. 1946 Tier I
The Bay Ridge doctor's daughter whose class notes became the textbook
Her father saw patients on the ground floor of the family house in Bay Ridge, many of them longshoremen, and what losing work did to them was dinner talk. Her mother had taught school before the children came. Yellen edited the paper at Fort Hamilton High School and graduated valedictorian in 1963. She went to Brown intending philosophy, switched to economics in her first year, and moved on to Yale, where James Tobin supervised her dissertation and her lecture notes circulated for years among graduate students as the unofficial textbook. Harvard hired her in 1971, one of two women in the economics department, and denied her tenure. She took a staff job at the Federal Reserve in 1977 and met George Akerlof in the cafeteria. They married inside a year.
With Akerlof she worked out why employers pay more than they must: workers who judge a wage unfair withhold effort, so the higher wage buys back the productivity. She joined the Fed's Board of Governors in 1994 and argued Alan Greenspan out of pushing inflation to zero, showing that about two percent left more room to fight unemployment. She chaired Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, ran the San Francisco Fed from 2004, and on February 3, 2014 became the first woman to lead the Federal Reserve, or any major central bank. Unemployment fell from 6.7 to 4.1 percent on her watch and the Fed raised rates for the first time since 2006. In 2021 she became the first woman to run the Treasury, where she pushed a global minimum corporate tax and the price cap on Russian oil.
On June 27, 2017, she said she did not expect another financial crisis in our lifetime. Five months later Donald Trump passed her over for a second term on the advice of his Treasury secretary, leaving her only the second Fed chair eligible for reappointment to be denied one. In the two years that followed she took 7.2 million dollars in fees for 50 speeches, including a million from Citigroup and 800,000 from the hedge fund Citadel, and then went back into government as the official whose department regulates them. In 2021 she said the inflation then arriving would be transitory. On May 31, 2022, she told CNN she had been wrong about the path inflation would take.
She left the Treasury on January 20, 2025 and returned to Brookings, where she has spent the time since warning that the Federal Reserve's independence is under threat and calling the tariff program a wrecking ball taken to the economy. The verdict on her own record is not in and will not be for years. The labor-market case is strong: no Fed chair since William McChesney Martin in 1970 left office with unemployment lower, and the economy added jobs in every month of her chairmanship. The inflation case runs the other way, and the fact that both institutions she led misjudged the fastest price rise in 40 years is the first thing her critics reach for.
Lifespan
Janet Yellen's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.
Notable works
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The Fair Wage-Effort Hypothesis and Unemployment
article
With George Akerlof — why unfair pay buys less work 1990 -
An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing in the United States
article
With Akerlof and Michael Katz, and much argued over since 1996 -
Explaining Trends in the Gender Wage Gap
article
A Council of Economic Advisers report she oversaw 1998 -
Wells Fargo asset cap
other
The first time the Fed capped the total assets of a bank 2018 -
Global minimum corporate tax
other
Negotiated through the OECD during her first year at Treasury 2021
Life in brief
with age at each point- 1963 aged ~17 Graduates valedictorian of Fort Hamilton High School in Brooklyn
- 1971 aged ~25 Takes a Yale doctorate under James Tobin and goes to Harvard Harvard denied her tenure five years later.
- 1977 aged ~31 Joins the Federal Reserve staff and meets George Akerlof They married in June 1978 and have collaborated ever since.
- 1980 aged ~34 Joins the Haas School at Berkeley She became only the second woman tenured there, in 1982.
- August 12, 1994 aged 47 Sworn in as a Federal Reserve governor In 1996 she talked Greenspan out of a zero inflation target.
- February 18, 1997 aged 50 Becomes chair of the Council of Economic Advisers
- February 3, 2014 aged 67 Sworn in as chair of the Federal Reserve The first woman to lead the Fed or any major central bank.
- January 26, 2021 aged 74 Confirmed as Secretary of the Treasury She had been the first woman to run the Fed and became the first to run the Treasury.
- May 31, 2022 aged 75 Says publicly that she was wrong about the path of inflation
Related
Contemporaries
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