Janet Yellen On The Financial Crisis: "I Didn’t See Any Of That Coming Until It Happened"

In a post last week, The Truth About Janet Yellen's Forecasting Record, I reported that Fed vice-chair Janet Yellen never saw the financial crisis coming. In speech after speech in 2007, as I detailed, she did not see the crisis developing, despite problems in the mortgage sector, even in early 2008, she indicated in a speech that she did not expect any problems in  the economy to last beyond the first part of the year.

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