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Janet Yellen: Obama’s pick for Fed chief

There are reports that President Obama will nominate Janet Yellen as the next chair of the Federal Reserve on Wednesday.

This final note today, in which we learn government shutdown and debt limit notwithstanding, macroeconomic policy waits for no man.

Or woman, actually.

There is word from the White House this afternoon — not confirmed but widely reported nonetheless — that tomorrow President Obama’s going to nominate Janet Yellen to replace Ben Bernanke and run the Federal Reserve.

And, therefore, basically the American economy as well.

Yellen’s currently the vice-chair of the Fed.

As a Fed governor, she was known as an impressive debater, once arguing Alan Greenspan into agreeing that a little bit of inflation was a good thing. As a person, she’s often described as disarming. Kevin Hassett, now at the American Enterprise Institute, was a staffer at the Fed when Yellen was a governor there in the early ’90s. “She was unique among the governors,” he says, “in that she would come hang out in the lunchroom with the staff. She wasn’t one to put on airs.”

Here’s more from our profile of her work and background.

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