Janet Yellen用坚定的握手迎接一个访客，并达到了商业。Seated at a table in a spacious Federal Reserve Board office, her hands calmly placed over a folder full of notes she had no need to consult, Yellen proceeded over a little more than an hour to calmly and methodically make the case for the central bank’s quantitative easing policies.
这是2012年8月，我正在访问美联储，报告美联储和其他主要央行的非凡货币政策的故事，以及无休止的债券购买和零利率可能无法恢复经济的风险，或培养新的资产泡沫。耶伦被毫无疑问，精确和礼貌，以明确的语言解释为什么美联储的双重授权义务促使它尽一切可能刺激增长和就业，而通货膨胀仍然削弱。QE正在产生影响，令人沮丧的率和产量蔓延，但这不是灵丹妙药，她承认自己的风险。
“It’s hard to see what buttons we can push to get the economy back to full employment in 2014,” she said. Asked when the economy and the yield curve might get back to normal, Yellen didn’t sugar coat it; four to five years, she said, is her hope and reasonable expectation.
Considering that the financial crisis began five to six years ago, depending on your preferred starting point, Yellen’s prognosis virtually implies a lost decade for the U.S. economy. On the other hand, it would mark a successful Fed chairmanship, assuming she wins Congressional approval for a four-year term beginning in February following her nomination by President Obama on Wednesday.
Yellen represents a strong degree of continuity in U.S. monetary policy, a factor that reassures many market analysts and investors. Like Ben Bernanke, the current chairman, who taught economics for two decades at Princeton University before moving to the Fed, she is an academic at heart, having taught at the University of California Berkeley. She has been an ardent proponent of QE and the use of forward guidance to indicate to the market that rates will remain very low for a very long time to come, leading a dovish wing that includes Bernanke, New York Fed President William Dudley and Chicago Fed president Charles Evans. And she is arguably the most-experienced nominee ever, having worked in the 1970s as a researcher at the Fed (where she met her husband, the Nobel prize-winning economist George Akerlof), returned as a Fed governor in the ‘90s, chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under Bill Clinton and then served a decade as president of the San Francisco Fed before coming back east as vice chairman in 2010.
Yellen is no knee-jerk dove, though. She persuaded Alan Greenspan in the ‘90s that the Fed shouldn’t aim to eliminate inflation, arguing that it would run the risk of deflation, but she has been equally adamant in ruling out an increase in the Fed’s 2 percent inflation target, contending that is both impractical and would risk undermining the Fed’s credibility. She also suggested a tougher stance toward regulation, a growing priority for the central bank. She expressed early concerns about housing prices while at the San Francisco Fed, even if she never pressed for action to rein in the sector. Recently, she has indicated a desire to ratchet up capital requirements on too-big-to-fail banks on top of the surcharges contained in the Basel III capital accord.
Yellen will need to reconcile the tensions between the Fed’s two mandates at a crucial juncture. Doubts about the efficacy of QE, which Bernanke and Yellen admit has diminishing returns, have grown in recent months as the Fed’s balance sheet has ballooned. At the same time, the economy’s momentum has slowed and the fiscal standoff between the Obama administration and the Republican House of Representatives could trigger a new recession if it gets out of hand. The Fed’s decision not to start tapering its bond purchases last month was a close call, and a vocal group of Fed regional presidents remains strongly opposed to the bank’s continued bond purchases. “I’ve never seen a committee as divided as this,” says Laurence Meyer, a former Fed governor and senior adviser at Washington-based forecasting outfit Macroeconomic Advisers.
Bernanke’s very collegial style backfired when, to appease the hawks, he spelled out exit scenarios at his June press conference. That move persuaded financial markets the Fed would start tapering bond purchases in September, sent interest rates soaring and triggered massive capital flight from emerging-markets economies. Three months later, the Fed blinked, concerned by the volatility it had unleashed.
在周三发布的联邦公开市场委员会的几分钟举行的9月17日至18日会议，强调了美联储内部的政策划分耶伦将不得不违反。一个营地对令人担忧的恢复和不断增长的风险令人担忧的令人担忧的令人担忧的令人担忧的兴趣较慢，其他人认为，劳动力市场在过去的九个月内有所改善，并且由于大多数市场参与者期待，可能会逐渐变细，可以“破坏信誉或破坏信誉或破坏信誉或货币政策的可预测性。“在每月850亿美元的速度维持债券购买的决定是“相对近的电话”，分钟表示。
Global policymakers in Washington this week for the annual meetings of theInternational Monetary Fund and the World Bank紧张地盯着美联储，奥巴马政府在奥巴马政府之间的债务天花板支架，看看他们是否会引发新鲜的波动。Joyce Chang是J.P. Morgan的全球固定收入研究负责人，在货币政策上讲述了一个国际货币基金组织的货币政策，即美联储需要将更清晰的信号发送到市场的退出策略，以尽量减少市场动荡。
yellen可以更好地处理内部美联储政治和外部通信吗？根据最近的一项调查，它不会受到近年来近年来的预测记录的预测记录比其他一项同事更好Wall Street Journal。她的病人，没有废话，数据驱动的方法也应该有所帮助。“She’s rigorously empirical as opposed to doctrinaire about it, which is what you want in your Fed chair,” wrote Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and former chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden, in response to news of her expected nomination.
耶伦还将标志着美联储的一个值得注意的，染色体，更改，设定为中央银行100年历史上第一个女性酋长。没有人知道是否能让她能够打破美联储的玻璃天花板的技能可以帮助她更好地管理其政策制定过程，但它将在临界时期焦点中央银行酋长的所有关注。
“今晚，我觉得我的女儿的经济未来很好，”密歇根大学的经济学家贾斯汀沃尔夫人，“在他的博客上写道。“I also plan to tell her that she, too, can grow up to become the most powerful economist in the world.”
Whether that’s powerful enough to invigorate the world’s largest economy remains to be seen.
Read more about银行和资本市场。