New Fed boss Yellen has pedigree for the job

Janet Yellen will be the Chair of the Federal Reserve. The announcement was made by the White House late on Tuesday and will make an official announcement on Wednesday afternoon.

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LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - The announcement that Janet Yellen would be the next chair of the Federal Reserve replacing the outgoing Ben Bernake in January, sent markets up as investors approved of the decision with their wallets.

The basis of the boost is that Yellen will continue the policy of quantitative easing that Ben Bernake has promoted.

Yellen has publicly favored strategies that bring down unemployment, even if at the possible expense of inflation. In 1995, she said that she favored "humane policy" when it conflicted with inflation concerns. In other words, a little inflation is perfectly acceptable as long as people have jobs and can pay their bills.

However, the government has been spending easy cash at an unprecedented rate and continues to do so in order to prop up the economy. Investors have been waiting for someone at the Fed to apply the brakes, but this has not happened yet. Speculation is that it will not happen in October with the impasse over the budget, but it could start to happen in December.

Yellen, who is 67, is the current Vice Chair of the Fed and is the natural successor to Ben Bernake.

Yellen's nomination is also historic. She would be the first woman to chair the central bank in its century-long history.

Prior to her role as Vice Chair at the Federal Reserve, Yellen served as President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco from 2004 to 2010. Before that she was an economic adviser from 1997 to 1999 and has spent the majority of her time as a professor at UC Berkeley.

Her husband is Nobel Prize winning economist, George Akerlof, and her only son is an economics professor.

Her policies may be open to debate, but her pedigree is not.

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