San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Bay Area shaped Yellen’s savvy
Excolleagues praise Biden’s expected Treasury pick
Janet Yellen, Presidentelect Joe Biden’s expected nominee for Treasury secretary, spent three decades in the Bay Area as a professor at UC Berkeley and president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
If confirmed, Yellen would be the first woman to lead the department, after breaking barriers as the first woman to chair the Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2018. Her impending nomination would be the latest example of Biden seeking historic picks, following the choice of Sen. Kamala Harris, an Oakland native, as his running mate.
Former colleagues describe Yellen as a brilliant thinker who cares deeply about the practical consequences of economic policy on people’s lives, a critical question as the country struggles with a historic recession and raging coronavirus pandemic.
Yellen couldn’t immediately be reached for comment through the Brookings Institution, where she is a fellow.
Yellen was born in Brooklyn in 1946 and attended Brown and Yale, where she received a doctorate in economics. In 1980, she began teaching macroeconomics at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
“People could see she was going to be really talented at teaching and research right off the bat. It was very clear this was a very keen intellect,” said James Wilcox, a
Haas professor who taught alongside Yellen for about two decades. “We had found a gem.” Although much of her work was focused on research and data, Wilcox said, she always considered realworld implications.
“She’s really thoughtful about how policies work out in practice. She’s really thoughtful about people, how individuals are affected by these policies,” Wilcox said.
Yellen’s husband, George Akerlof, is a Nobel Prize winner and economics professor who also taught at UC Berkeley.
Sam Zuckerman, who was Yellen’s speechwriter at the San Francisco Federal Reserve, said she demanded hard work from employees but was also gracious, sending flowers to recognize accomplishments, for instance.
“She’s really thoughtful and concerned about the people who work for her,” said Zuckerman, a former Chronicle economics reporter. “It’s really a great argument for why there should be more women in high positions of power.”
Wilcox said Yellen was conscious of her status as a woman in a maledominated field, but she sought to lift up people of all backgrounds.
“She wanted to look for (people with) talent and abilities and hard work wherever you might find it,” Wilcox said.
In a 2004 interview with Zuckerman in The Chronicle a few months after becoming leader of the San Francisco Federal Reserve, Yellen presciently highlighted two of the biggest challenges for Bay Area: housing and transit, which would explode in severity over the next decade as the economy boomed.
“I’m worried, of course, about affordable housing. In a way, because we are such a skilled workforce, we’ve bid up housing prices to the point where lowincome people, even middleincome people, can’t afford it. That and traffic and congestion are problems to worry about,” she said.
Yellen also cited the Fed’s twin goals of “maximum employment and price stability.”
A decade later, as chair of the Federal Reserve after being nominated by President Barack Obama, Yellen largely succeeded in achieving those goals as the economy hummed.
But in a break with precedent, President Trump did not nominate her for a second term and she departed in 2018. The Washington Post reported that Trump thought the 5foottall Yellen was too short for the job and also disliked her association with Obama.
In Yellen’s final act in 2018, the Federal Reserve punished San Francisco’s Wells Fargo after its fake accounts scandals, imposing an unprecedented limit of $1.95 trillion on the bank’s assets, and seeking the removal of four board members. The move has won praise from progressives. On Monday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who had also expressed interest in being Treasury secretary, praised Yellen and cited the regulatory crackdown.
“Janet Yellen would be an outstanding choice for Treasury Secretary. She is smart, tough, and principled. As one of the most successful Fed Chairs ever, she has stood up to Wall Street banks, including holding Wells Fargo accountable for cheating working families,” Warren said on Twitter.
Zuckerman said Yellen’s positions are liberal, but also rooted in economics and data.
“Her values are quite progressive. They’re also rigorous,” he said.
If Yellen returns to government, she will face perhaps the biggest challenge of her career: stabilizing the national economy as the coronavirus pandemic rages and trying to pass additional economic stimulus in the face of a Senate that could be controlled by Republicans, while the country already faces a major deficit.
Last month, Yellen called for more government aid to help workers. “While the pandemic is still seriously affecting the economy, we need to continue extraordinary fiscal support,” Yellen told Bloomberg.