THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW - October 10, 2013****-- Obama's Fed choice, Janet Yellen, a longtime Fed official --*WASHINGTON - Janet Yellen, President Obama's choice to be Federal Reserve chairwoman, is a longtime Fed official who would likely maintain current policies, observers said.
"Markets will be comfortable with a familiar face," JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief U.S. Economist Michael Feroli told The Washington Post.
Yellen, 67, the Fed's second-in-command since 2010 and a close adviser to outgoing Chairman Ben Bernanke, is to join Obama and Bernanke in the White House East Room at 3 p.m. Wednesday for the president's nomination announcement, the White House said Tuesday night.
Bernanke's term ends Jan. 31.
The Fed vice chairwoman -- who a former colleague told The New York Times is "a small lady with a large IQ" -- must be approved for the four-year Fed chief term by the Senate amid squabbling between Democrats and Republicans over fiscal issues.
Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said: "I think she has a very good chance of being confirmed. I think she will have bipartisan support."
But some Republicans expressed concerns about whether Yellen was sufficiently committed to the Fed's goal of keeping inflation in check.
"I voted against Vice Chairman Yellen's original nomination to the Fed in 2010 because of her dovish views on monetary policy," said Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who sits on the Banking Committee, which must approve the nomination before it can go to the full Senate for a final vote.
"We will closely examine her record since that time, but I am not aware of anything that demonstrates her views have changed," Corker said.
A dove usually means someone who is more concerned with unemployment than with inflation.
Obama's first choice for the job, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, dropped out of the running Sept. 15 following opposition from Democratic senators.
Yellen, who as an academic focused on the labor market, is an architect of the Fed's aggressive $85 billion-a-month bond-buying program intended to stimulate the economy and bring down unemployment.
The central bank has been preparing investors since April for its plans to wean the financial system off the easy money.
As chairwoman, she would lead a committee of 19 policymakers who are divided over whether the bond-buying program is doing much good and worry the Fed's $3.5 trillion portfolio of treasury and mortgage securities is getting dangerously large, The Wall Street Journal said.
The Fed has also sought to boost the economy by holding short-term interest rates near zero percent. It has promised to keep them there until the 7.3 percent jobless rate falls to 6.5 percent or lower.
Before serving as Fed vice chairwoman, Yellen was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers. She was also a longtime professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business. Before that she lectured at the London School of Economics and was an economics assistant professor at Harvard University.
Yellen graduated summa cum laude from Brown University with a degree in economics and received a doctorate in economics from Yale University.
If approved by the Senate, she would become the first female chief of the nation's central bank -- or any major central bank.
She would also be the first Democrat to lead the Fed since Paul Volcker stepped down in 1987.
Yellen was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., and is married to Nobel Prize-winning economist George Akerlof. They have a son, Robert, who is also an academic economist.
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