Hooray! Obama Nominates Janet Yellen to Head the Fed -The iPINIONS Journal

From day one of my commentaries I’ve been a one-man cheerleading team encouraging the strides women are taking to rule the world … with the same compassionate and humanistic instincts with which they’ve always ruled the roost at home.

We have enough data, as well as anecdotal evidence, from the way women have influenced the corporate world to make some credible extrapolations. The correlation between more women holding positions of power and the implementation of family-friendly policies is undeniable in this respect. Therefore, it’s entirely reasonable to assert that if more women held positions of power in politics they would use their power more towards building up human resources than military armaments – just to cite one obvious example.

Indeed, it’s arguable that there’s a direct correlation between the fact that Finland’s president, prime minister, president of the Supreme Court as well as eight of its eleven government ministers are all women, and the fact that Newsweek rated this county the best place to live in 2010 – in terms of health, economic dynamism, education, political environment, and quality of life.

(“Women Make Better Politicians than Men,” The iPINIONS Journal, October 14, 2010)

This is why I could not have been more gratified yesterday when President Obama nominated Janet Yellen as chairmanwoman of the Federal Reserve. When confirmed she will become not just the first woman to hold this position in the Fed’s 100-year history, but also what is globally recognized as “the most powerful and influential banker in the world.”

I appreciate of course that most of you have no more interest in what the Fed does than in what CERN does. Exactly.

But it might interest you to know that, as Fed chairwoman, Yellen will have even more power than Obama has to affect inflation, unemployment, and mortgage rates, as well as to determine how much you will pay for all kinds of goods and services. And I, for one, will sleep a lot better knowing that that power will be vested in her instead of her rival, Larry Summers.

Also, if you’ve heard outgoing chairman Ben Bernanke delivering his semi-annual monetary policy reports to Congress, you know that he (like all of his all-male predecessors) seemed to regard the Fed’s function as little more than manipulating statistics, data points, and trend lines. No doubt this is why, listening to him (and them), you could be forgiven for thinking that the aim of these policy reports was just to sound as much like an inscrutable Oracle as possible.

By contrast, Yellen is already on record validating my take on the qualitative difference she (or any woman) as chair would bring not only in determining Fed policy but also in delivering its semi-annual reports. Here, for example, is what she said in a keynote speech at a conference sponsored by the AFL-CIO and the IMK Macroeconomic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. on February 11, 2013:

These are not just statistics to me… When you’re unemployed for six months or a year, it is hard to qualify for a lease, so even the option of relocating to find a job is often off the table. The toll is simply terrible on the mental and physical health of workers, on their marriages, and on their children.

Ironically, perhaps her nomination just reflects the traditional view that a woman would be better suited to wean the U.S. economic off the Fed stimuls it has been milking for so many years. But the only thing that would have me cheering louder for Yellen’s nomination is if it were a female, instead of a male, president of the United States who made it….

NOTE: The second most powerful and influential banker in the world is arguably the head of the IMF. And she just happens to be Christine Lagarde of France, whose selection I heartily cheered here two years ago. You go … girls!