Sounds like this is another one of them liberals that caused the big crash of 2008:
WASHINGTON — Following President Barack Obama’s failed effort to install his former economic adviser Larry Summers as Federal Reserve chairman, Janet Yellen, the central bank’s vice chair, has emerged as the frontrunner to succeed Ben Bernanke in the Fed’s top spot. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and dozens of other Democrats in both the House and Senate have endorsed Yellen to be the next Fed Chair.
While supporting Yellen has become a cause célèbre for progressives opposed to Summers’ regulatory hostilities, Yellen supported a host of economic policies during the Clinton era that have since become broadly unpopular. She backed the repeal of the landmark Glass-Steagall bank reform and she supported the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement. She also pressured the government to develop a new statistical metric intended to lower payments to senior citizens on Social Security.
These policies all enjoyed substantial support among economists during the 1990s, although many of those who endorsed them at the time have since recanted or criticized their implementation.
Yellen’s reputation as a more consumer-friendly economist than Summers rests largely on her tenure as president of the San Francisco Federal Reserve during the Bush years, when she identified the emerging housing bubble and called for deploying stronger regulation to limit its damage.
But in the 1990s, Yellen and Summers both served in the Clinton administration, and pursued many of the same policies. Yellen began serving as Chair of President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers in 1997, and publicly endorsed repealing Glass-Steagall’s separation between traditional bank lending and riskier securities trading during her Senate confirmation hearing. Yellen referred to deregulating banking as a way to “modernize” the financial system, and indicated that breaking down Glass-Steagall could be the beginning of a process allowing banks to merge with other commercial and industrial firms.
via HuffPo: Janet Yellen Urged Glass-Steagall Repeal And Social Security Cuts, Supported NAFTA.
Foxes guarding the hen house.
