The latest from the he-man club
by digby
So Janet Yellen’s a great gal, smart and thoughtful and what not. But she’s just not one of the boys:
They are big on the team player concept, people diving in together to sort through the hard and messy challenges they face. When Timothy Geithner was New York Fed president, for example, he, Bernanke, and Kohn were very much a team plotting the central bank’s response to the financial crisis (other key players in that tight-knit group were Bill Dudley, then the head of the New York Fed’s markets desk, and Kevin Warsh, then a Fed governor in Washington). In the early months of the Obama administration, the same could be said of the group that included Geithner, Summers, Gene Sperling and others who are now influential voices advising the president on the decision.
Throughout this time, Yellen was running the San Francisco Fed — very effectively, according to interviews with people who worked with her closely before and during the crisis. But she was on the outside looking in regarding some of the seat-of-the-pants decisions that were being made over how to rescue the American economy.
And those are some big pants — huge (if you know what I mean.) And Yellen’s a lady. She’s got nothing to offer when it comes to pants.
Read the whole article. They apparently value “manic” decision making over deliberate analysis, which explains a lot. And while the president told us all the other day that he wanted the fed to concentrate on getting unemployment down, in this article he seems to have morphed into a Chicago school inflation hawk. And apparently poor Yellen just isn’t as hardcore as one might want about keeping our virtually non-existent inflation in check even if the cost is perpetually high unemployment. Waddaya gonna do?
Greenspan’s still around, probably muttering something about irrational exuberance and parasites, I’m sure he’d be up for another term. Why are we setting our sights so low? Hell, why doesn’t he just reanimate Andrew Mellon’s corpse and nominate him?
Ron Suskind took a lot of heat for writing in Confidence Men