The Biggest Problem With Janet Yellen Might Be Her Husband

Janet Yellen and husband Geroge Akerlof

Joe Biden's nominee for Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, is a typical over the top Keynesian in favor of mad money printing by the Federal Reserve but a bigger problem might be the influence of her husband, George Akerlof, on her thinking.

You can't get much more authoritarian in your thinking than Akerlof does.

 John Tamny writes:

In Phishing for Phools, a 2015 book that George Akerlof co-authored with Robert Shiller, the authors wrote without even a hint of irony that people “do not do what is really good for them, they do not choose what they really want.” Please think about the previous bit of absurdity from the two economists. Maybe think a while.

If they’re to be believed, we’re all just a collection of idiots. That’s what their allegedly careful economic analysis concludes...

 In a short book that remarkably took the authors five years to write, Shiller and Akerlof even made time to go after Cinnabon. It’s hard to type this without laughing, but apparently Cinnabon controls us too! If the authors are to be believed, this rather minor shopping mall tenant has long had a knack for making us do what we shouldn’t by expertly placing its stores “in the track of people who would be vulnerable to that smell.”... 

Important about all this is that Akerlof, the co-author of what might be one of the most ridiculous books on “economics” ever written, is married to Treasury secretary nominee Janet Yellen. Much more important, Akerlof recently told the New York Times that he and Yellen have “always been in all but perfect agreement about macroeconomics.” If so, it might be useful for the senators questioning Yellen at her Treasury confirmation if near “perfect agreement” between her and her husband includes admiration for Phishing for Phools?  

Yes, Janet Yellen's husband, despite a claim to favor free markets, hates them. You see, according to Akerlof, free markets influence people and he prefers that he control all the people instead. 

This is the man Yellen is married to. 

 -RW