Yet, despite there being no record of her warning in advance that a financial and economic crisis was coming, many of those who are promoting her for Fed chair are falsely stating that she was a great forecaster of the crisis.
Maybe this will help put the falsehood to rest. ZeroHedge has dug up an NYT report of a Yellen statement made in 2010 before Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. NYT wrote:
Ms. Yellen told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in 2010 that she and other San Francisco Fed officials pressed Washington for new guidance, sharing the problems they were seeing. But Ms. Yellen did not raise those concerns publicly, and she said that she had not explored the San Francisco Fed’s ability to act unilaterally, taking the view that it had to do what Washington said. “For my own part,” Ms. Yellen said, “I did not see and did not appreciate what the risks were with securitization, the credit ratings agencies, the shadow banking system, the S.I.V.’s — I didn’t see any of that coming until it happened.” Her startled interviewers noted that almost none of the officials who testified had offered a similar acknowledgment of an almost universal failure
Earlier this year, the Fed released the minutes from its 2007 meetings. I did not go through the minutes directly; however I compiled in chronological order several of the comments as reported from four different sources: New York Daily News, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Bloomberg. The minutes offer virtually no evidence that the Fed considered housing to present a significant risk, or to present a major risk to the greater economy.
ReplyDeleteHowever, there was an interesting twist in the reporting. I noted at the time that several of the four reports attempted to position Yellen as (relatively, but nowhere near the reality) the most prescient of the bunch, and that this suggested the possibility that she had already been selected by some very important people to take over for Bernanke.
http://bionicmosquito.blogspot.com/2013/01/they-didnt-see-it-coming.html
So she's a rotten economist and completely unqualified to run the Fed. That should seal the deal for her.
ReplyDelete