Chair

Institutional context

The Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System is the senior officer of the central bank of the United States. The Federal Reserve was established by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. From 1914 through 2014, every Chair was male — a span of 100 years.

Career path

Yellen earned a PhD in economics from Yale in 1971 and held faculty positions at Harvard, the London School of Economics, and the University of California, Berkeley. She served on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from 1994 to 1997, as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under Clinton from 1997 to 1999, as President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco from 2004 to 2010, and as Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve from 2010 to 2014. By the time of her appointment to the Chair she had served at the Federal Reserve in three distinct roles.

Appointment

President Obama nominated her in October 2013 to succeed Ben Bernanke. The Senate confirmed her on 6 January 2014 by 56–26 (a contested vote by historical standards for a Chair). She was sworn in on 3 February 2014.

Tenure

Four years. Her tenure included the first interest-rate increase since 2006 (in December 2015) and the beginning of the Federal Reserve's balance-sheet normalisation process. She was succeeded on 5 February 2018 by Jerome Powell after President Trump declined to renominate her — the first time in the modern era a sitting Chair was not offered a second term.

Cluster context

Yellen's 2014 appointment is in the early period of the rate-acceleration. Her later appointment as Treasury Secretary in 2021 means a single individual is responsible for two of the dataset's most senior US financial firsts. The Bank of England, Bank of Japan, and several other major central banks have not had a female Governor; the Fed and the European Central Bank are the cluster members on the central-bank axis.

Sources

• Federal Reserve — Former Chairs
• Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System — Press archive