Yellen, a former economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the first woman to serve as either Fed chair or Treasury secretary, is in some respects a typical Biden appointee: acceptable to both the establishment and liberal wings of the party, admired for her competence and experience. Unlike many of her colleagues, however, she often inspires genuine enthusiasm across the ideological spectrum. Hedge-fund managers concerned about the overall lack of financial-market experience on Biden’s team were effusive in praising her to me. At the same, she also warms many hearts on the left, a rarity in a Treasury secretary, whose job is to oversee areas like tax policy, bank regulation, the sale of government debt and economic ties with other countries. “You had to have somebody in the Treasury role who could look the American people in the eye as an incredibly esteemed, gravitas-wielding macroeconomist,” says Felicia Wong, the president of the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive nonprofit. She has also, Wong notes, “done a lot to try diversifying the economics profession.”
Yellen may even be the rare technocrat with feminist-icon meme potential, in the tradition of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (“Notorious R.B.G.”) and Elizabeth Warren (“Nevertheless, she persisted”). A few days after Yellen’s Senate confirmation hearing, a “Hamilton”-esque tribute by the rapper Dessa premiered on public radio; it has since been played online more than 200,000 times. (“She’s 5-foot-nothing, but hand to God/She can pop a collar, she can rock a power bob.”)
The comparison with Warren is instructive. Just as Warren, from her perch atop a congressional panel overseeing the Wall Street bailout in 2008 and 2009, second-guessed the insiders who ran the banks, Yellen has made her reputation partly through dissenting from the groupthink of the financial establishment. A few years earlier, at the Fed, where she ran its West Coast regional bank, Yellen pointed out to colleagues that the housing boom looked increasingly like a mania. “One of the reasons she actually had a much better ability to see what was happening was that she was in San Francisco; she was an outsider; she was not in the Washington bubble,” says Dennis Kelleher, the chief executive of Better Markets, a Wall Street watchdog group.
Warren appeared to recognize a fellow traveler when, in 2013, she led a group of senators who publicly urged Obama to elevate Yellen to the Fed chair over Lawrence Summers. She also backed Yellen’s appointment to Treasury last fall. In this way, Yellen has become the most visible edge of Warren’s personnel-based strategy of nudging the party leftward; she has quietly lobbied to place sympathetic policymakers in key administration positions, often with former Warren aides serving beneath them. (Neera Tanden, a former Hillary Clinton aide who is Biden’s pick for budget director, is also a sometime Warren ally; Yellen has hired a former Warren aide as a deputy chief of staff.) The efforts of politicians like Warren have been abetted by a network of increasingly vocal groups — including the Roosevelt Institute and the Revolving Door Project — clamoring for progressive nominees over more business-friendly choices.
The way Yellen has used her bully pulpits over the years suggests that her priorities overlap with Warren’s, even if her views are not quite as populist. In one of her early speeches as Fed chair, a position Yellen held from 2014 to 2018, she dwelled on the topic of rising inequality and “whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation’s history.” The speech prompted criticism from a prominent House Republican, who accused Yellen of “sticking your nose in places that you have no business.”
But like many center-left economists, Yellen tends to emphasize the struggles of those near the bottom more than the excesses of the 1 percent. When I spoke with her in January, she riffed at length about policies like training that could help workers without a college degree, but she didn’t mention raising taxes on the wealthy, a major goal of progressives. (Yellen, who earned more than $7 million giving speeches to large banks and other businesses as a private citizen over the past two years, appeared during her confirmation process to embrace Biden’s proposal to raise taxes on investment income for those making more than $1 million.)
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/magazine/biden-economy.html
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