Janet Yellen was named last week by President Barack Obama to be the chair of the Federal Reserve. If approved by the Senate, as expected, she will become the first woman to lead the 100-year-old central bank.
Yellen, 67, would replace Ben Bernanke, whose second four-year term ends Jan. 31. She has been vice chair of the Federal Reserve since October 2010. She also was a professor at U.C. Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and is now professor emerita.
According to JTA, Yellen and her husband, George Akerlof, were active in the Bay Area Jewish community when Akerlof taught at U.C. Berkeley and Yellen was president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco from 2004 to 2010. Akerlof won the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics and is the Daniel E. Koshland Sr. Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Economics at U.C. Berkeley.
Yellen, a native of Brooklyn, N.Y., is poised to become the third consecutive Jewish economist to head the Federal Reserve, following Bernanke and Alan Greenspan. — j. wire reports